There are still jobs to be done to keep the garden ticking over, according to Dan Pearson in the Guardian. I don't know about ticking over. I'm at full clatter, in the race against time to get as much as possible cut down (once it's finished flowering), weeded, mulched, Strulched, tied in, pruned (assuming you can prune it at this time of the year) and generally tidied before it starts raining heavily, blowing a gale, freezing, or snowing.
The asters have suddenly finished. When I gave my talk on autumn colour, only eight days ago, the island bed was a mass of pink and dark red, with flashes of blue. I made a mental note to get some more A. lateriflorus and A. ericoides and more 'Little Carlow', to introduce some variety into the sea of solid, medium sized pink flowers, and picked stems with gratitude to illustrate the talk, since we'd pretty much sold out at work. A week later the flower heads have faded, and the stems are going on the compost heap. I feel mean not leaving them for the birds, but there are plenty of seed heads elsewhere in the garden, I don't want them seeding (more pink) and there won't be time to do all the clearing away in March, so I'll have to forego the full new perennial planting experience of brown and sere stems throughout the winter. I want that bed dusted with fish, blood and bone, and the Strulch topped up, before Christmas. Ideally before mid-November.
I'm taking the tops out of the buddleias below the veranda. There are two, of the same variety, which is good from a design point of view, given the size of the border, but a waste from a plant collecting perspective, since I could have had two different ones. The first one blew out of the ground not long after planting, and I sighed about the expense and frustration of gardening and bought a replacement, then the original plant regenerated from the roots. Buddleia can be prone to wind damage, and in an exposed garden it's not a bad idea to reduce the top hamper in the autumn, leaving the final pruning until late winter in case it's a cold one.
The two ends of the slab path have finally met up, after having a pile of slabs lurking in the back of the border for about two years, and my method of estimating the quantity of slabs I'd need by pacing it out has worked, since there are exactly the right number. Of course, I could always have cheated by budging them up a bit or spacing them out, but then the middle section of the path wouldn't have matched the two ends. I haven't finished levelling the soil for each one, just put some of them down at this stage, but at least the route is now clear.
The perennial sunflower, Helianthus salicifolius, which is supposed to provide foliage interest late in the year, has flopped over disastrously. It makes very tall, unbranched stems, with narrow leaves like a willow (the clue's in the name), which look splendid in photographs of Great Dixter. The smallish yellow flowers are an irrelevance, the leaves are the thing, except that Christopher Lloyd's plants grew more or less upright. I am puzzled why mine have flopped so much. Lack of light? They are tucked into a patch with shrub roses around them, and the house shades them for the first part of the day, but wouldn't they go upwards between the roses in search of light, rather than giving up and lying down?
I may have just answered my own question by googling them, and coming up with a page on the Missouri Botanical Garden site, which says that if grown in part shade they will be taller, and may require support. Oh dear, next year I need to stake them. I am not very good at staking. It tends to be just one step too many, on the always very long list of things to do (come to think of it, I don't think there is any month when my garden is ticking over. There are periods when the weather, or illness, stops play, but then I'm grinding my teeth in frustration at not being able to do anything, unless I'm very ill indeed.)
Meanwhile, it is still so warm that the Systems Administrator is able to let the chickens out for a run in the afternoons, and sit outside with them to scare the foxes away. They enjoy coming out so much, it's a sad moment when it gets too cold to commit to supervising them. Sad for the SA, too, who enjoys an excuse to sit in the porch reading, or playing a fiendishly complicated military strategy game set in the Vietnam war (or Candy Crush). The hen that was moulting has sprouted a new set of feathers remarkably quickly, going from practically oven ready to fully feathered in only a few days. Well, her tail is still on the small side, but at least she's waterproof.
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