My Garden This Weekend – 1st December

Japanese Fern Holly

A lovely autumnal weekend although the weather man is telling me that meteorological we are in winter.  It doesn’t feel like it yet especially as the leaves are taking so long to fall this year.

On Saturday I went to my HPS group meeting.  I have to admit that I left at lunchtime as I just felt out of sorts.  The last few weeks at work had finally caught up with me and now that the pressure is off, well until January, I think my body just needed to rest.  So instead I came home and spent the afternoon on the sofa selecting my seeds from the Alpine Garden Society seed list.  I have been amazingly decisive this year and I have decided not to sow as many seeds next Spring.  I have said this before but I need to focus my efforts more as my gardening time is limited and I need to manage my expectations of what I can achieve more realistically.

Today, with recharged batteries I set too and collected up some bags of leaves.  I’m not a gardener who is obsessive with collecting leaves but I’m also not a gardener who turns their back on their garden at this time of the year.  I am working through the borders tidying those with lots of spring bulbs first.  I really don’t agree with the idea of leaving the leaves on the borders when there are lots of perennials and bulbs as to my mind I am just providing a nice warm home for the slugs to live in.  I have also read that leaf mold is very good for adding to alpine and bulb compost so I am determined to try to make some this year.

The patio border had the most drastic tidy up and it looks very bare at the moment.  The focus of this border is early spring and I have been adding snowdrop and narcissus bulbs over the recent year.  I can see this border from the living room and seeing the spring flowers appear always cheers me up in February and March.

Disporopsis perneyii

The border looks particularly bare as I removed a large clump of Japanese Anemones from it.  They have annoyed me for a couple of years now as there wasn’t really enough room for them and every year they end up flopping over the patio.  I have others so this clump has gone to the compost bin and instead I added a Disporopsis perneyii which I think will do well in this location.

I was pleased to see that the bulbs are already pushing their nose up so it wont be long before a green sheen fills the border.

I also tided the other end of the patio border which has been planted up predominantly with Japanese ferns.  It struck me today how many ferns I seem to have acquired this year and how good they are at this time of year for providing autumn/winter interest (see top photo).  I love their structure, texture and the variety of greens.  In fact I seem to be more and more interested in foliage and texture and flowers are becoming more of a bonus.

The next job on the list was to review the larger plants in the Big Border.  Everything was planted in a bit of a rush in April/May and before there was any real thought of putting a secondary path in.  Needless to say this means that the main shrubs are no longer in the middle of the border but adjacent to the path.  I have moved the Viburnum a couple of feet and its new position looks much better and hopefully this poor plant will get a chance to get its roots down.  I also relocated the Giant Scabious as it is just too big for the border.  It may be called the Big Border but it really isn’t big enough to fulfill all my aspirations!

The Giant Scabious has been relocated to the border along the top of the border which is slowly but surely becoming a bit of a rogues gallery housing more and more of my bigger and butcher plants.  Hopefully they will continue to do well and screen the fence.

Moving these two plants get me to get my mind in gear about this border. I don’t want to fill it with dahlias etc again  next year but I havent been able to work out an alternative.  I already have a young tree peony in the border and it seemed sensible to add more peonies especially as I had three sitting on the patio waiting for a new home.  I added some Aquilegia and Thalictrums that were also waiting to be re-homed, hopefully I have worked out correctly which is which!

The Big Border is also looking a little bare and I really need to think about adding some foliage and texture to it but I will see how the peonies, Aquilegia and Thalictrum do next year before I make any hasty decisions.  I have tended to give the different borders a particular season/month of interest so it isn’t surprising that some of them look very bare at the moment.  There is plenty of interest elsewhere in the garden so I’m not too concerned.

So a busy and rewarding day although it is clear I havent done so much gardening for a while as I really ache now.  More plant moves are planned but it will depend on the weather and we have also decided on a small seating area adjacent to the workshop behind the Sorbus which will be a winter/spring project, oh! as well as painting the workshop and the fences!