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.

crocus

I planted more crocus bulbs in the bottom lawn today, one hundred each of Crocus tommasinianus 'Ruby Giant' and 'Barr's Purple'.  I planted a couple of Cyclamen hederifolium in the border as well, and the ground is still dry.  Two hundred divots of turf is enough to lift in one day, to avoid ending up with a blister on one's palm.  It looks a bit pink anyway, and I was trying to grasp the handle rather than press down on the end.

I used to have a good population of crocus in the borders at the bottom of the garden, mostly named varieties of C. chrysanthus, but they were badly attacked by voles (or mice, or something) last winter.  I don't know if that was because the weather was so particularly harsh, or whether the rodent population is simply increasing as the garden matures.  I find a lot of little holes in the borders when I'm weeding, and we disturbed a couple of voles (or something) when we were scrantling the long grass.  One of them got scrantled, so they must not be as good at ducking under the blades as the toads.  The rodents dig down to find the crocus bulbs, which they eat, tossing discarded stems around.  Unless it was the muntjac.  Some of the few surviving clumps were tucked in close the the base of shrubs and under the protection of their stems, which I wouldn't think made any difference to a vole.  The crocus in the grass fared better for some reason.  Maybe they were harder to find, or harder work to dig up.

Two hundred bulbs spread over a large lawn don't really go very far.  My hope is that they will spread and multiply, since Crocus tommasinianus are supposed to be excellent naturalisers, and that if I add some bulbs each year, nature will increase them and do the rest.  That has been my policy with the snowdrops, and the cyclamen, which are not cheap to buy.  This year there is a good crop of cyclamen seedlings, after many years when I didn't seem to get any, so perhaps the plants appreciate my annual applications of leaf mould, or perhaps it helps that the current generation of chickens don't go into the back garden.  Some people advise you to pot up cyclamen seedlings and grow them on in individual pots in the greenhouse, which sounds like an excellent policy if you have the time.  Given how frantic it gets in my greenhouse, and how crowded, I suspect they would be very likely to be over or underwatered, or get too hot at some point in the summer, and that they are better off taking their chances in the border, under the shade of the wild gean.

Still to plant, or pot up, is the bag of Anemone blanda (blue) bulbs.  I much prefer blue to the other colours when it comes to Anemone blanda.  The bulbs are funny little black, knobbly things, which are supposed to be soaked in water overnight to rehydrate them before planting.  I keep forgetting to put them to soak on an evening when I'm going to be working in the garden the next day.  They don't last well in the garden, dwindling after a few years, and I don't know if that's because the growing conditions don't quite suit them and they die, or whether the rodents are eating them as well.

The only other unplanted bulbs are the tulips, which don't want to go in until November anyway.  I have tried to be restrained this year in my bulb orders, since they are fripperies in comparison to getting various bits of the borders sorted out.  It was such a beautiful day today outside.  Fingers crossed we have a good October and run up to Christmas, so that I can have a proper go at the things that still need digging out, and get the areas replanted, or ready for replanting in the spring.  Which is ridiculous, since what I hope for will make absolutely no difference to what the weather does.