Scrap, save or start? Your autumn garden audit starts now!

Early September is THE time to plan changes in your garden.  The triumphs and the mistakes are mostly still staring you in the face, for one thing! But what alterations will you make?  

We 3Growbags each have our own wildly-divergent ideas…

I need less garden.  There, I’ve said it.  I know my sisters have been telling me this for years, but I wasn’t listening. In fact I mostly responded by digging another flower bed. But an inspirational trip to an Italian garden last year convinced me that an outdoor space doesn’t have to be completely stuffed with plants in order to be a truly satisfying and beautiful garden.

The other reason is that anno domini is catching up with me a bit, and while I still love all the work involved in caring for plants, it all starts to hurt a little more.

So I’m simplifying several of my flower beds this autumn, taking out the perennials, keeping most of the shrubs and roses, and generally calming the flowery mayhem.

I have already begun, and it’s quite a scary process digging up plants that have served you faithfully for many years.  At least most of them have finished flowering by now and I don’t have to look at their reproachful faces as I wield my spade.  (And if I keep them tucked away in pots out behind the compost bins or somewhere, I can always plant them out again in the beds in a couple of years, if I’m missing them too much 🤣).

Another project on the cards was a radical renovation of my tatty Rosa rugosa hedge, but it has flowered and fruited this year with all the enthusiasm of a terrier at a rat convention so it’s getting a reprieve (it must have heard me muttering).  Caroline’s might not be so lucky…

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Hmmm, a minor contraction in one of the two gardens, either side of The Channel, that she maintains solely herself – think Elaine will need to keep taking that daily turmeric tablet…

My main autumn alteration concerns a piece of the garden formerly referred to as No Man’s Land.

The dominant coloniser is this wild patch appears to be alder and, with my ecologist hat on, I’m deducing this is because it sits wet in the winter. So I’m dreaming of pollarded willows, gunnera and maybe even a swamp cypress. I made a start earlier in the year with my requested Christmas gift, a chainsaw, and am looking forward to resuming the clearing work this autumn, now that the bird-nesting season is over.

Another autumn reflection is that it seems impossible to maintain clear areas in a gravel garden without a huge commitment to at least weekly weeding. So, having been inspired by a visit to the new Piet Oudolf designed glasshouse borders at Wisley, I intend emulate his naturalistic style by planting a matrix of low grasses wherever there are gaps in my no-water gravel area (sorry Beth Chatto, but I did try ..) For a more in-depth and eloquent description of the ‘Oudolf Landscape’ at Wisley I’m putting a link to an article by our great friend and mentor, Alexandra Campbell, of The Middle-Sized Garden, at the end of this blog .

A final concern I have though, is about Caroline’s plans this autumn. Her sunny front terraces looked gorgeous for her recent Open Garden weekend. But I think this success has gone to her head, and she now seems to have it in for a perfectly acceptable clump of white rugosa roses in her exposed and inhospitable driveway, without realising that she’s lucky that anything prospers there. The neighbours agree so I’m thinking of starting a petition.

And then there’s her stubborn refusal to make anything of her shady car park area. Obsessed with happy-clappy flowers she’s shipped in begonias and petunias – fine in sunny pub window box, but some proper structural shade lovers would look so much classier.

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I feel sorry for my sisters having to constantly change their gardens because of the mistakes they’ve made. If only, comme moi, they’d made better decisions at the outset, they wouldn’t have such an onerous autumn ahead.

Yes I admit my rosa rugosa bank is getting on my nerves (as you can see from this week’s feature pic…..) and while Laura is busily organising a human shield to protect it from my demolition plans, I note that Elaine, too, has hers in her crosshairs.

My bank is very exposed. The prevailing westerly wind pushes the rosa rugosas over to expose their unappealing thorny stems but, refusing to recognise their own deficiencies, they boldly sucker all over the shop, and the overall effect is frankly tatty. I’ve complained about this before.

You probably have the same question as my sisters had, namely – what am I planning to replace them with, in this challenging spot? I was happy to reveal the answer in our zoom call this week, but I’d only managed to utter ‘forsythia, hypericum’ and get half way through potentilla ie ‘poten’, before I got this reaction. Is there something wrong with them or is it me?

Not content with sabotaging these plans Laura has persistently instructed me to create a shade bed along my north-facing elevation (if only she’d stick to her own garden). I’ve ignored her, but now she’s insisting that I at least plant up the metal trough on that wall with ferns and hellebores (it’s full of begonias at the moment which she simply ignores).

I’ve tried to put her off by sending her AI’s impression of what ferns and hellebores will look like in that trough (boring). To be fair it’s a poor impression, but I’m sure AI will make a better job of illustrating VERY BOSSY sisters, because I have such good data to input on this.  

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There you have it – we are planning taking out some flower-beds, re-developing marshy areas and gravel areas, and taking out rosa rugosas that have outstayed their welcome. What about you? Are you determined to make some changes to your garden this autumn? We’d love to hear about your ideas……..

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Is it a root vegetable or an ornamental garden plant? It can be both according to Louise, who has made this unusual climber her Great Plant this Month:

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If you’re thinking of spring bulbs, we’ve had a Quick Look round for suppliers’ offers at the moment. Worth a look?

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On the subject of bulbs, Laura is enjoying the beauty of some that flower well in pots in the early autumn and has made a short video of three of her favourites.

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Incredibly, this is the two hundred and fifty first gardening blog that we three sisters have written together! We had no inkling that we’d still be on this incredible adventure together nine and a half years after we started. Thank you very, very much to all of you, our fabulous readers, for being so wonderfully supportive over the years.

💚 The costs of keeping our site working and safe are going up. We want to go on sharing everything for free without adverts, but if you enjoy our weekly posts, the price of a cup of coffee would be extremely helpful in paying the bills! Thank you 💚

Finally, for further reading on the new naturalistic borders at RHS Wisley, Alexandra Campbell’s article 5 Lessons in planting style from the new Oudolf borders at RHS Wisley is very illuminating.