Friday 4 November 2011

the autumn tidy up continues

I gave up waiting for frost to blacken the leaves of the dahlias, and started cutting them down.  After last night's rain, the ones in pots are as wet as they need to be before going into winter storage under the greenhouse staging, and it feels like time to put them away for this year.  Cutting the string off the supporting stakes, chopping down the dahlia stems and weeding the tops of the pots and the dahlia bed by the greenhouse, is another step towards winter.  Though it still doesn't feel like winter.  I'm trotting around the house with my bare feet shoved into a pair of clogs, and wandering outside to put the recycling out in a T shirt.

The Iris unguicularis are starting to put on a good show, not just the odd bloom but approaching a full display, so they are working by the calendar and not the thermometer.  Down by the septic tank, the ivy shaped leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium have expanded to almost cover the ground, another winter plant on the move.  The flowers have been and gone by now, but the leaves are a good feature in their own right.  I've bought a few more plants each year for over a decade to build up my stocks, always choosing ones with good leaf markings as well as selecting for flower colour, and they are starting to seed themselves around, so that while not there yet I'm getting closer to the sheet of cyclamen effect I've admired in various gardens open to the public.

We had 12mm rain last night, enough to soften the ground surface, though it has not penetrated very deep.  I've begun cutting the lawn edges around the paving slab path that leads across the back garden.  Over the course of the summer the grass has crept across the surface of the slabs, so that by now some of them are barely visible, just smudges of Marshalls Heritage in line across the turf.  Paving slabs dropped into lawns are somewhat retro, but a very practical way of getting hard access to the bottom of the back garden.  On frosty mornings I want to be able to go out there and look at the winter flowers without leaving footprints across the grass, to reproach me for my carelessness for weeks afterwards by going brown where my weight has damaged the frozen grass blades.  It's impossible to see where the edge of each slab is, so I make a rough guess, probing with the lawn edger, and shifting a centimetre further out if I touch concrete until the point where the blade slides down into the earth.  It looks smarter at the time not to cut too far away from the slab, though the lawn advances back quickly enough.

I've been coaxing fallen leaves off the gravel too, a fingertip job to avoid picking up stones as well as leaves.  I've collected red leaves from the Japanese maples, yellow leaves from the field maples and hazels, and big brown leaves from the Malus tschonoskii.  This is a useful tree, with a vase shaped habit and an ability to tolerate vile soils and transplanting at a large size that make it ideal for public landscape schemes.  I bought it for its excellent autumn colour and because I needed a relatively narrow tree in that spot.  I've never met any gardener or tree enthusiast who raved about Malus tschoniskii.  It does a job, but doesn't seem to inspire love.  Poor tree.

The Systems Adminsistrator collected chestnut leaves using the leaf vac, and has promised to go after the leaves from the 'Tai Haku' over the weekend, when more have fallen off.  It's tricky knowing when to start with leaf collection.  Too early and you end up raking over every bit several times, but too late and they have blown away into inaccessible places.  If you just wanted them off the lawn that might be fine, but I want the leaf mould.

This will be a working weekend for me, so no more gardening until Tuesday.  We need more rain, but please let it rain in the night.  I lost half this morning to some heavy showers.  Tidying dahlias and leaves is all very well, but I need to get out the heavy equipment, and make a start on the hebes that need to come out, to be replaced by box, and the big bed along the boundary.

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