Walled Garden September Update
Change is afoot..
Like many people tasked with recording the seasons in some way, I’d expected to sit down this week to talk about the shift from summer to autumn, but as it happens, I’m writing this in a sort of heatwave. The clues are all there though: heavy dew on the grass, crisper mornings, and crucially that extraordinary change in the quality of the light as the north pole dips away from the sun. After a little research I found out that this difference is brought about by, amongst other things, the sun's rays passing obliquely through more of the earth’s atmosphere. This means that the light that reaches us is a softer,warmer, attenuated version of that which beats down on your back and lays everything flat in summer. It lengthens shadows and burnishes seedheads, but it turns out it also literally changes how we see colours - the longer path through the atmosphere shatters shorter blue and green wavelengths meaning what reaches us are the warm reds and oranges. This all made perfect sense to me because I, like I suspect most gardeners, note the very specific point in the year where the senescent yellows start to make sense alongside crimson apples and smoky mauve asters. It’s so distinct that it makes you think there should be a separate word for this bit between late summer and early autumn, but in any case it’s time to stop ‘de-brownstuffing’ and start embracing change.
It was on a particularly rhapsodic early autumn morning last week that I took a notebook for a walk around the garden, leaving footprints in the dew-soaked grass. It was almost two years since I did this for the first time, having just started here as Head Gardener, but this time the intention was very different. Now I am writing a long list of winter jobs to be ably completed by the small team I’ll leave behind when I go on maternity leave. It will be a wrench to leave the garden for six months, but I don’t doubt my attention will be elsewhere in no time - a different kind of winter project. This is also to say that this will also be the last of my monthly updates for a little while, unless I’m struck by a bolt of inspiration and the seemingly more miraculous gift of free time.
But I’m still here for the time being, and there are still jobs to be done, albeit by others while I gesticulate from a distance. The last few weeks we’ve continued to spread mulches over bare areas, and have more or less emptied the glasshouse of perennials to fill empty borders. The hedges got their summer haircut, the last of the apple cordons were finally pruned after a careful check of the nests therein, and we’ll shortly cut back the lavenders to keep them from becoming wayward. We’ve been harvesting figs and plums and will soon start filling baskets of apples to make into apple juice, but don’t worry - we will save some for you to press on our Apple Pressing Days - 21st and 22nd October. In the next few weeks we’ll start dismantling our annual pot displays as they begin to run out of steam, and will stow away the empty terracotta pots to try and stop the frost getting to them. We’ll also be composting the spent annuals from the cutting garden ready to direct-sow seeds such as Ammi this autumn, in the hope of an early crop next year. And on the subject of next year it’s cheerio from me until April when I’ll return, with the spring, in a new light.
Kate