Planning for next year’s garden..
November’s Updates In The Garden
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the slightly anachronistic tendency of gardeners to retain old names for long-gone features. It’s why, for example, Great Dixter has a Rose Garden where there has been an Exotic Garden since 1993, and it’s why we at Preston Hall refer to a decidedly dry area as the Pond Garden despite having filled in that feature a year ago. Over the past few weeks we’ve been redeveloping our Rose Garden to change its shape and introduce a longer season of interest by working herbaceous perennials into the planting mix. Only around twenty five percent of the original roses will remain but the area will almost inevitably still be known, by me at least, as the Rose Garden. It’s also relevant to mention that these beds sit inside a larger area known as the Flower Garden due to a one-time abundance of herbaceous borders and interwoven gravel paths, which now exist only as ghostly depressions in the turf. Plus ça change.
Reshaping the beds in the Rose Garden has required a good deal of lifting and replacing turf as well as re-cutting edges that have sunk over time, and this is a great time to begin any repairs to grass whether it’s turfing or seeding. Sowing grass seed now means that you’ll get good germination but slow top growth, giving a good root system before the weather warms next year. This logic also follows for other seeds such as sweet peas. These we sowed last week by first soaking overnight to soften the tough seed coat then placing one seed in each cell of a root trainer. The resulting seedlings will be grown hard over winter in a well-ventilated and unheated glasshouse, and after being planted out in April will give us earlier flowers than a spring sowing.
Sweet peas are generally tougher than people give them credit for, but plants that won’t tolerate a cold winter must be either composted, propagated, or lifted in November. For us that means pulling any annual plants from borders, taking the last few cuttings of tender or borderline plants, and lifting Dahlia tubers - but only once the foliage has been browned by the first frosts. A more experienced gardener than me told me the tubers are better next year if you do this, and whilst I don’t know if that’s true it’s still a good reminder to get a move on.
The other activity on everybody’s mind in November is bulb planting. This year we’ll be placing drifts of tulips into our redesigned Rose Garden to give some colour while the new plants establish, and greedily stuffing bulbs into pots in anticipation of spring displays. New for this year are terracotta pots of Amaryllis, Paperwhites, and Hyacinths for indoor display at Christmas. These will be available to buy from us in a few weeks’ time - more details to follow in due course. Until then I hope you are not too ruffled by such an early mention of Christmas and can get back to enjoying this unseasonably mild autumn!
Kate