Who said Autumn was mellow?
There’s a long-standing rumour that autumn is a time for winding down, snuggling into a blanket with next year’s seed catalogue and letting the garden gently senesce into winter.
In one way this belief is understandable: there is less birdsong; many garden visitors, such as house martins, have moved to warmer climes while others, such as some butterflies and ladybirds, have found a safe nook to get through the winter.
On the other hand, I never feel quite so busy as I do in the autumn. There’s always something to do in a garden, but it’s more than that — there are so many decisions to make:
- Should I mulch now or in the spring? If now, what sort of mulch am I going to use, and where?
- What am I going to do with which perennials — leave the seedheads for the birds and the frost; cut off the seedheads to reduce self-seeding; cut back (if so, how far and do I put the leftovers in the compost or go for ‘chop and drop’)?
- Is it too late or too early to plant new spring bulbs and, crucially, can I remember where all the existing bulbs actually are?
- Which plants do I want to move and/or propagate from, and by which method?
- Am I leaving the leaves on the beds, or moving them somewhere less conspicuous, or taking them off to make leaf mould?
I ask all of these questions of myself each year, and am frequently asked by others keen to get a simple answer for what to do in their own gardens. My answer is always a solid… ‘it depends’.
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Part of the joy of gardening for me is that there are very few outright right answers. This is not always as pleasing for others. But, there are a number of factors involved:
- each garden is different, with all sorts of soil, weather exposure, plants.
- life can throw in a few unexpected events, knocking garden plans off course.
- individual preferences can have a huge impact, a very neat gardener will give a different answer to someone at the opposite end of the spectrum. Neither is necessarily wrong or right.
For many of us, myself included, we do different things each year, or even in the same year in different parts of the garden.
Take mulching. On a sandy soil, which is all I know, the general advice is to mulch in spring. This can help to seal the winter moisture into an otherwise free-draining soil, and reduces the loss of nutrients through leaching, which would be more pronounced if the mulch was applied in autumn. Very sound, so this is what I do. Unless…
…I’m looking after shrubs that have ended up with very shallow roots perhaps from problematic watering in the past, as has happened with a Hydrangea that I’ve been trying to resurrect. I like to give these plants a nice winter blanket over the roots for a bit of protection.
In a similar way, some of the half-hardy (H3) plants that I’m ambitiously attempting to keep alive at 57 degrees north also benefit from a deep mulch. But even on this one issue, it depends. Plants whose above ground growth dies back completely, like Dahlia cultivars and Commelina coelestis, get a healthy dose of mulch. For a plant that retains stems and leaves, such as Osteospermum jucundum, this treatment would leave the plant sitting in a wet sludge for 4+ months. Not unreasonably, this is not something my Osteospermum enjoy.
Then there’s the crossover between some of the questions and decisions above — to keep a bed looking tidy, and improve the soil, and provide winter habitat for invertebrates I will often wait until the majority of leaves have fallen on a particular bed and then mulch on top. I have used this double whammy of benefit to transform a bed in a formal garden (which had to look tidy). Within three years of adopting this approach, soil that had previously been poor quality and parched now supports a healthy population of Astilbe. Not a species known to be stoic about dry conditions.
I’m not going to go through all of the questions above in the same way. Suffice it to say, there are lots of options and lots of decisions to make at this time of year. It never seems to me to be a simple mellowing of the season just finished.
Autumn is full of excitement — next year begins now!
