Schools are back and autumn has arrived. There is that autumnal smell in the mornings that reminds me of being a child and going back to school, the leaves are starting to fall and my garden is being bombarded with acorns.
I tend to find my garden doesn’t have the June gap, I’ve plugged that one, but instead has a end of July / beginning of August gap, but by now the roses are having their second flourish and the asters, rudbeckias and echinaceas are thriving and adding a wonderful burst of late season colour.
My absolute favourite in the garden this month is still my Aster × frikartii ‘Mönch, it is still going strong and through propagation over the last few years my plants are increasing. I have another 5 new plants waiting in the wings to plant out next year.
Autumn and spring are the best times of year to do planting in the garden, without the intense heat of the sun the plants have a better chance of survival. The soil is still warm enough now for the roots to establish before winter arrives. With that in mind a visit to Longacres was like Christmas last week. So many wonderful plants in, it was hard to get everything I wanted in one trip, so 3 trips in 4 days was a record and I still haven’t even purchased my bulbs yet…
Every year as a memory of our time in Kansas, I buy chrysanthemum balls to go in my pots out the back. Not being a huge fan of yellow I’ve gone for the pink and white scheme out there, but then I saw these stunning chrysanthemums in Longacres so thought I’d go bold by the front door.
This is one of my trouble areas in the garden, having an enormous beech tree out the front means that anything planted struggles due to the mass of roots that cover the whole area. In my front flowerbed I dug a foot down last September and replaced it with fresh compost and manure, already it is a solid mat of roots again so I’ve just had to do it again. It’s an excuse to buy some fresh bedding plants and add a splash of colour by the front door. I just love the Chrysanthemum, it should keep going until the frosts appear.
I’ve spotted that there is a new influx of 9cm plants coming back into store, these are a really cost effective way of buying new plants.
Some of them can be planted straight into the ground now, such as foxgloves, whilst others it would be worth potting up into a 1 litre pot once you start seeing roots coming out the bottom of the pot and then keeping them protected over winter. I tend to do this with the echinacea’s with a mulch of Strulch on the top and then only plant out the following June / July once they show good growth and a strong root system. This helps protect them against slug attacks if they are a strong healthy plant once they go in. And all for the price of £1.99 a plant instead of £4-5 per plant.
My Salvia collection seems to be growing, I used some salvia tanzerin as centre pieces in my summer pots and these have been taken out and potted up to be used again next year or I’ll protect them over winter and plant them in the flower beds in the spring. I saw some salvia Amante which I couldn’t resist so they have replaced some erysimum Bowles Mauve that had gone woody.
There seems to be constant trial and error to find out what works well in the garden. Due to the large trees no part of the garden has full sun plus they take out so much moisture and the soil is very sandy, so this limits some the plants that I’d love to have in the garden.
Autumn is a time for making notes about what has worked and what hasn’t this year, and moving anything that is in the wrong place. My astrantia’s haven’t done well this year so I’ll be making notes for next year to see how they do. My sedum spectabile has flopped so I will need to divide it in the spring, however in the meantime the honey bees and bumble bees are enjoying some late season nectar.
Now it’s time to keep raking up the acorns and enjoying some autumn colour whilst I do.
