It was the warmest end of October on record, 23.6 degrees C at Gravesend and at Kew Gardens. It felt pretty pleasant in the back garden, and I pottered between the rose beds, chopping down fading leaves, scooping up rose leaves to go in the council bin in a token effort to combat the black spot, and trimming the edges of the lawn.
Autumn has been so mild that a lot of foliage has barely begun to turn, but on the basis that I can't do everything in March it was time to make a start. The leaves of the Brunnera macrophylla had just begun to blacken and fade, in a rather uneven way so that some plants still looked pristine, while others were crying out to be tidied up and relieved of their embarrassment. Brunnera is a shade tolerant species that will also put up with a fair degree of drought, and makes quite effective ground cover. It has pretty blue forget-me-not like flowers in the spring, and unlike many woodlanders the leaves last all season in the ground, though they never did in pots at the plant centre. I started with named forms with silvery variegated leaves, and one plain green form with white flowers. Be warned, Brunnera is not perfectly well behaved, since those pretty blue flowers set abundant seed, and the offspring will not necessarily be variegated or silver. The white flowers are not honestly very interesting, and nowadays I tend to dig out plain green plants, especially if they're crowding other things.
I chopped down the spent flower stems of the Acanthus mollis, and pulled off the tatty outer leaves. That's another self sower that scatters its large, brown, shiny seeds almost too prolifically. One of the Writtle tutors warned us to think carefully about where we wanted it to go before planting one, since if we moved it later we'd have two plants, one in the original site and one wherever we'd moved it to. By the same token you need to be on the ball, and remove unwanted seedlings early while they're still small. Despite my best efforts (which I have to conclude were not very good) by now I have a slightly larger patch of Acanthus than I really want, and tomorrow I'd better chisel away at the plants at the edge of the group and try and take back some territory for the other occupants of the border.
I started to cut down the Baptisia australis as well. Its foliage turns black once touched by frost, and after the warm October most of it is still fresh greenish grey, but the plants have had a good long growing season, and ought to be able to cope with losing their leaves by now. It's a vigorous grower, tall and bushy, and I need to clear the space so that I can get on with weeding the bed and cutting back the long stems of roses that are once again snaking out of the rose bank and towards the lawn in search of new spaces to conquer. Baptisia has spires of blue flowers, which this year didn't seem to make much of a show, but the number of stems of rattling, black podded seed cases shows that it must have flowered fairly generously at some point. I have read all sorts of confusing and contradictory statements about the growing conditions that Baptisia requires, but based on my experience here I've found it thoroughly happy on very heavy clay, and quite drought resistant, while it failed miserably on sand. It's another one that will seed itself generously, given the chance.
So does the blue flowered Centaurea montana. I dead headed them a while back, since I have enough, and today was cutting off the old flowering stems, and any shabby basal leaves. Purple and amethyst flowered varieties have featured as part of many Chelsea Show gardens in recent years, but it was the plain blue I wanted, in homage to my childhood. When I started looking for it a quarter of a century ago it was so out of fashion that I had a job even to track down seed, but it has since made a modest resurgence. Like the Baptisia it seems much happier in the awful clay of the far rose bed than it ever was in the pure sand of the long bed.
The lawn edges are a mess, and I should love to have that flexible steel edging and keep the curves sweet, with a discreet, not too large gully to stop the running lawn grasses and clover working their way into the beds. But it is fiendishly expensive and I couldn't justify the expenditure.
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