The end of the summer hols – back to school, back to work…….and it’s just the same for gardeners too!
September brings plenty of early autumn tasks such as moving or digging out plants in the borders, choosing new roses or prepping alpines for winter…
Making changes
This can be a fabulous time for looking critically at your borders and rearranging things or creating a new planting area in your garden borders. In our region like many others, we have had another dry summer leaving the clay soil dense and hard and we are now hoping for plenty of September rain to soften the ground. As soon as that happens, I shall be hard at work……
Are there some vigorous plants that have overwhelmed other more delicate things? Make a note to dig them out as soon as you can this autumn. This can also apply to plants that you want to keep but that are dying back and flopping over others that could look wonderful in September and October – they just need not to have droopy moribund neighbours draped over them! Leave the plants with gorgeous seedheads though – they look great and the birds will thank you.
You may have decided that some plants have come to the end of the road in your garden. Dig them out this month, improve the soil with rotted manure or compost, ready to plant something new and better in its place. If the soil is heavy, think about adding grit to lighten it and open up the soil particles.
If soil that you’re digging over for future planting is very weedy, think hard about using a rotavator to ease the task, because you run the risk of chopping up weed-roots into a thousand different pieces all of which will make a new plant (can you hear the voice of experience talking here 🙄?)
Most plants are fine to be moved in the autumn, but you just need to be careful about grasses. Planting or re-planting ornamental grasses at this time of year can mean that their roots have not established sufficiently before the winter wet arrives, and the crowns of the plants can rot. Much better to leave the grasses until spring.
Repeat-flowering roses
We had a great response about last week’s blog about good plants for a drought. One of our correspondents said that she was thrilled about how well her climbing rose ‘Meg’ was coping with all the dryness (it’s a beauty that I adore too!). I have to say all my repeat-flowering roses have totally excelled this year too – their deep taproots have obviously shrugged off the danger of running thirsty and revelled in the heat.
For roses to prove themselves worthy of a place in the garden, I think they must get a big tick in at least two categories:
- Beauty of flower
- Scent
- Single (and thus attractive to pollinating insects)
- Fabulous foliage
- Gorgeous hips
- Lack of thorns
- Resistance to disease
- Repeat-flowering
And as we enter the season for buying bare-root roses….. I’d just like to mention a few to you who have excelled in the last category, in case you’re in the market for such good do-ers:
R. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’; ‘Simple Peach’, ‘Champagne Moment’, ‘The Alnwick Rose’, ‘Hot Chocolate’, ‘Westerland’, ‘Sally Holmes’, ‘Moonlight’, ‘Bonica’, and ‘Blush Noisette’. It’s a real mix of types and colours but all of these respond astonishingly quickly to dead-heading, putting on new growth and being covered in buds or flowers again within three weeks. Many, many roses do this repeat-flowering trick a little, but those ones, I promise you, do it a lot!
Our granny once wrote in my autograph book:
“Make new friends but keep the old,
For one is silver, the other gold”.
So true of friendships of course, but I thought of this when admiring ‘The King’s Rose’ yesterday bought this year at Chelsea (just look at our feature pic this week!) It’s so like my old once-flowering friend Rosa mundi, but my new friend has bloomed all summer, even in its first year. Perfect. Laura is definitely the most adventurous of us Growbags when it comes to trying out new plants, but sometimes even I can hit…..well, gold.
Autumn is a good season to take some rose cuttings and I made a video a while ago on how to do this – the link is as the bottom.
Gardening shorts
- If you’re thinking about starting to plant bulbs, begin with the woodlanders – anemones, trilliums and the like, which prefer a longer autumn season than most spring bulbs, to get established.
- Your climbing roses might have long whippy growths waving about at the top, and they can be shortened or tied in during autumn, to stop strong winds from damaging them. Do their main pruning in winter after the leaves have fallen and you can see exactly what you’re doing.
- Alpine plants hate being cold and wet at the same time (I am SO with them!). There might be some wild autumn rains on the way, so this is great time to mulch alpines and succulents with coarse grit or fine gravel. It stops soil from splashing up onto the foliage, and creates the sharp drainage needed to prevent the plants’ crowns from rotting.
Finish digging potatoes this month and store them in an airy place (not in plastic) in the dark to prevent them going green and thus poisonous.
- In recent dry weather, quite a few trees seem to have started losing their leaves early. It’s time to put a net over garden ponds to catch leaves before they sink to the bottom, decay and foul the water.
Roses are expensive – even the bare-rooted ones. Do you fancy making some roses for free? I’ve made a short video about how to take semi-hardwood cuttings of roses. It’s easy, costs nothing and you may have great success. Why not have a go?
An eye-catching plant at this time of year but one that divides opinion. However it’s definitely approved of by Louise who has made it her Great Plant of the Month:
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