Late Butterflies

Its been reported that this has been a very bad year for butterflies, and that’s certainly been borne out in our garden. So it was satisfying to see two very attractive species in the garden at the weekend. The first was a Red Admiral, here feeding on an aster (one of the self-seeded Symphyotricum novi-belgii varieties)…

I read somewhere that ‘Red Admiral’ is actually a corruption of the original name of ‘Red Admirable’, which makes more sense. I’ve never noticed the two little blue patches at the back of the wings before.

We also had two Comma butterflies flitting around, mostly attracted to the Verbena bonariensis

No doubt those Commas were drinking as much nectar as they could before the season comes to a full stop (see what I did there?) The growing season is beginning to shut down now, with autumn colours coming out in the leaves. This is the orange-flowered witch hazel Hamamelis ‘Jelena’…

The weather has turned cold, and the sun is low, and gardening is less about topping up the sun tan while you work, and more about wrapping up and trying to keep warm while you tidy up for the winter. The cannas have been dug up (apart from the one shown at the foot of the page, which I left in the border to continue flowering) and put in the greenhouse for protection. As has this garden friend. She keeps us company in the garden all summer but, like me, can’t take the frost…

Note the tomatoes . Another of this odd season’s disasters, they sat and sulked for so long before finally starting to grow that they’re only now beginning to produce fruits!
The dahlias will be next to be stored. It’s so frustrating to visit gardens and see dahlias full of flower, when our two plants produced only one flower each all season. Yes, that’s just ONE flower each! I’d blame the peat-free compost (which we have had problems with in the past), but while one (Dahlia ‘Happy Days Red’) was in compost, in a container, the other (Dahlia ‘Bishop of Leicester’) has been in the ground for the past three seasons. I really don’t know what went wrong. Must try harder next year (and with both of us retired by then, we should have more time).

text & images © graham wright

October Gardening Jobs

Plant new trees and shrubs
The dormant season – autumn and winter – has always been seen as a good time to plant trees and shrubs. But if the pattern of dry springs and summers experienced over recent years continues, the sooner you get plants in, the better. The soil is still warm, there’s plenty of moisture around, so plants put into the ground now will have a chance of establishing an effective root system before winter.

Liquidambar styraciflua ‘Slender Silhouette’ – planted a few days ago.

Divide perennials
Perennials that have finished flowering and have formed decent-sized clumps can be divided now. If the centre sections are woody and unproductive they can be cut out and discarded. Re-set the other pieces where you want them, water them in, and they should be able to establish before the winter.

Use Fallen leaves
Autumn leaves should be cleared from lawns and paths (and beds too, if you wish) and can be collected up and turned into leaf mould – either in a purpose made-bin (with wire mesh sides) or in bags (hessian bags are best, but you can use plastic – but punch lots of holes in the sides and bottom with a garden fork). You could leave them on the beds as a soil-improving mulch that will rot down naturally – just make sure any small plants are not swamped.

Lawn Repair
Hopefully most lawns will have turned green again by now, but this is traditionally a good time to do remedial work, and after the summer we’ve had, many of them need it. Aeration reduces compaction, and can be done either with an aerator (manual, or powered), or with a garden fork. Push it in as far as you can, wiggle it about a bit, pull back on it to slightly lift the ground, and then repeat across the whole area. This is, I have to say, a job that consumes a lot of time and energy. Scarifying (raking) is good for the lawn too – it gets rid of a lot of the dead material, as well as moss. Any bare patches can be re-seeded.

Check tree ties
Bear in mind that tree trunks will have expanded, even during the poor growing season we’ve had. So if you have trees that are staked, you may want to check they aren’t being strangled. If ties are too tight, loosen them a little. A galvanised nail banged through the tie and into the stake (not the tree!) will stop the tie from slipping down.

Weeding
A perennial task, but despite the cooler temperatures, weeds are taking advantage of the rain to sprout and grow fast. Hoeing is not so effective in damp conditions, so weeds will need to be pulled or dug out. But…

Look for self-seeded plants
…pay attention, because among the weeds will be self-seeded plants you may want to keep. These might be wild flowers such as forget-me-nots and foxgloves – some people may see them as weeds, but many gardeners are happy to have them, as they’re colourful, attractive, and free. Many cultivated perennials, such as Verbena bonariensis, and Gaura, will self seed. And you might even find some surprises. In my garden, Salvia ‘Royal Bumble’ – a choice shrubby plant – has produced a couple of dozen seedlings in the ground around it.

Salvia ‘Royal Bumble’

Clean the greenhouse
Yes, I know – you don’t want to hear this, but it’s a good idea to thoroughly clean your greenhouse (if you’re lucky enough to have one). Cleaning the glass benefits the plants by maximising the light coming in. And keeping a clean greenhouse reduces hiding places for pests to over-winter.

Think about wildlife
Dead foliage and flower stems of perennials don’t necessarily need to be cut down until next spring. Left where they are, they will provide habitat and food for wildlife over the winter.

Store tender plants
Dahlia tubers can be lifted from the ground or removed from pots, cleaned up, and stored in dry material such as compost, sand or wood shavings, in a cool, dry, frost-free place. They don’t need light, so a garage or shed would be fine. It’s usual to wait until the first frosts have blackened the foliage before doing this. You can leave them in the ground, ideally with a thick mulch of compost on top, but there’s a risk they won’t come back next year if we have a cold and wet winter.
Cannas, frost-tender salvias (such as Salvia ‘Amistad’), pelargoniums etc. can be brought into the (freshly cleaned!) greenhouse (or a shed or garage, if you don’t have a greenhouse), in pots, ideally before the first frost. So keep an eye on the weather forecast!

Dahlia ‘Mexican Star’

Planting bulbs
It’s still a good time to plant bulbs for next season, in pots and in the ground. It isn’t too late to plant early bulbs like snowdrops, crocuses, or the little reticulata irises; or too early to plant later bulbs like alliums. I placed an order with Crocus again this year. Their plants can be expensive, but their prices for bulbs were very reasonable. I ordered ten each of three varieties of tulip, thirty Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’, and a pack of Iris reticulata. Very restrained!

A freshly planted pot of Iris reticulata ‘Alida’ – these flower in spring and are small and dainty – ideal for displaying on a table, where they can be seen more easily.

One problem I’ve encountered is that it’s impossible to identify where bulbs you planted into the ground in previous years are at this time, so you can end up inadvertently digging these up (and often damaging them), while you attempt to put the new ones in. Monty Don, on Gardeners World, offered a good solution to this problem. He planted his Allium hollandicum bulbs individually into small pots. He will plant them out next year, when bulbs in the ground are showing new growth, so he can avoid damaging them.

Covering pots with mesh, netting, chicken wire etc., until the bulbs start sprouting, will stop rodents digging them up and eating them. Some people do this for bulbs planted into the ground too, but it isn’t always practical.

Sow seed
And on the subject of greenhouses… Seeds of some annuals and perennials can be sown now, and kept in the greenhouse, rather than waiting for spring. Sweet peas are a favourite, but things like Ammi major, when sown in autumn, will flower earlier next year. A few weeks ago I sowed some Scabious (Scabiosa atropurpurea ‘Black Knight’), put them on a windowsill inside to germinate, and then moved them to a greenhouse bench to over-winter.

Scabious (Scabiosa atropurpurea ‘Black Knight’) seedlings – germinated on a windowsill inside, then moved to the greenhouse bench.

The summer is over, and it’s getting cold, damp, and dark. But there are still some warmer, brighter days. And the light at this time of year has a special quality. So if you choose your time, you can still enjoy the garden.

text & images © graham wright 2022

Flowers into Autumn…

Now that the weather is turning colder, and the days becoming shorter, many of the plants we rely on for summer colour have finished flowering. But there are many perennials that flower late, allowing us to extend the season well into autumn. Asters, for instance, will have been inconspicuous in the borders as steadily growing clumps of dark green foliage, but now, they are bursting into bloom…

You may know that most of the asters we grow in our gardens were recently renamed by botanists as Symphyotrichum (I’m sure they don’t deliberately make our lives more difficult!) Another familiar garden plant that was renamed recently, and which flowers at this time of year, is sedum (now Hylotelephium)…

This is a dark-leaved variety called ‘Xenox’. Being relatively low growing, sedums (sorry; Hylotelephiums!) work well towards the front of the border. They are succulents, so quite drought-resistant, and the small, pink flowers are a magnet for bees (though not when I took this photo!)

At around eight or nine feet tall (depending on the variety) a plant you wouldn’t put at the front of the border is perennial sunflower…

While the annual sunflowers that children delight in growing from seed (especially the really tall varieties) will for the most part have finished now, perennial sunflowers are only just starting. Their blooms are smaller and less showy than their annual cousins (both are varieties of Helianthus), but they are a welcome ray of sunshine on a dull autumn day. And the flowers look great, and are long-lasting, in a vase. Just one note of caution – perennial sunflowers tend to send out rhizomes in all directions, so you’ll need to dig around the clump regularly, otherwise it’s likely to take over your whole garden!

There are many more perennials that provide a splash of colour at this time of year. Rudbeckia, for instance (this is Rudbeckia fulgida var. ‘Goldsturm’)…

Japanese anemones, or windflowers (in this case Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’)…

Hesperantha coccinea (previously Schizostylis coccinea!)…

And this is Actaea simplex ‘Brunette’. The flowers are pretty, if a lot more restrained than some of the previous examples, and have a very sweet fragrance. It’s a useful plant, because it’s happy in some shade…

And the list goes on! The message is that with a little thought, it’s possible to design a garden that will give you flowers and scent, and provide for wildlife, all year round.

text & images © graham wright 2021
NOTE: this post also appears on the blog for my new garden design company Strelitzia Garden Design

Lovell Quinta Arboretum

It’s been a difficult year. For too long we’ve all been trapped; unable to visit the places we love, and those we’d love to discover. When Autumn arrived, and having missed out on so many garden visits, I was looking for somewhere to see some autumn colour. A web search suggested the nearest arboretum to where I live (about an hour away) was the Lovell Quinta arboretum in Swettenham, Cheshire. It’s just down the road from Jodrell Bank – the arboretum was created by Sir Bernhard Lovell, who was also responsible for the Lovell telescope at Jodrell bank.

The Lime Avenue

The arboretum entrance is beside the Swettenham Arms pub, in the little village of Swettenham, and after somewhat longer than an hours drive, it would have been rude not to pop in for a socially distanced coffee and desert. Refreshed and ready to go, we (Mrs Pullingweeds and myself) headed for the trees. The entrance fee is £2.50 with an honesty box at the entrance. It’s free to RHS members, but I felt they were underselling themselves, so we put a fiver in.

Our visit was perhaps a little early to catch the very best of the autumn colour, but there was still a lot to see. They had a Taxodium distichum (Swamp Cypress) planted as a focal point behind the lake…

Taxodiums are, as the common name suggests, one of the few trees that will flourish in waterlogged soil. They are deciduous, and produce good autumn tints. The lake looked somewhat scruffy, with a low water level, but that’s because it’s managed for wildlife.

The arboretum has an impressive avenue of Lime trees, from which pale yellow confetti was falling at a slow but steady rate…

This old oak had a hollow trunk, and exposed wood showing intricate patterns…

The arboretum has an astonishing range of trees, with those of different types arranged together. It holds national collections of Fraxinus (Ash) and Pinus (Pine). I was interested to see a little grove of Dawyck beech – Fagus sylvatica ‘Dawyck’, ‘Dawyck Gold’ & ‘Dawyck Purple’. Last winter I planted two of these in our garden; one each of ‘Dawyck’ and ‘Dawyck Purple’. You would need a very large garden to accommodate two standard beech trees, but the Dawyck varieties are tall, columnar trees. They give you the height and grandeur of a large tree, but only spreading to a width of around 2.5m to 5m, depending on who you believe (and perhaps it may depend on the individual specimen – trees of the same variety are not identical; they’re all individuals, with their own character).

I loved this combination of Eucalyptus (I can’t remember the variety) with the finely cut leaves of a rowan (I think this one is Sorbus commixta ‘Embley’). With the blue sky in the background it could almost be Australia…

I said we were there before many of the trees had reached their autumn peak, but our timing couldn’t have been better for this deciduous euonymus (Euonymus alatus ‘Compactus’)…

There are longer walks leading out from the arboretum, with some great views out over the Cheshire countryside, and of an impressive brick viaduct. Being limited for time (when are we never not limited for time!) we didn’t head out too far. We spent a couple of hours wandering through the arboretum, admiring the diverse beauty of all those trees, enjoying the peace and quiet. It’s a place that I’m sure we’ll b going back to this year (lockdowns allowing).

I was very restrained when it came to taking photographs – I probably could have taken more, but hopefully the ones here will act as a teasing preview that will encourage you to take a look yourself, should you find yourself anywhere near. It’s a Lovelly day out! Ouch! Bad, I know, but it had to be done ;¬]

text & images ©Graham Wright 2020

Stars of the Autumn Border

By this time of year, so many of our flowering plants have done their thing and are in various stages of decay – some more decorous than others. In autumn we rely on the turning leaves to provide colour and interest in our gardens. But there are some flowering plants that are at their peak now. One of these is the plant we know as sedum.[1.]
A dark-leaved sedum, sold as an unnamed variety, but which is probably ‘Xenox’).

A closer view, showing the intense colours of leaf and flower.

Another Autumn favourite is the aster, or Michaelmas daisy. The one below was actually taken last month at Picton Garden, near Malvern, which holds the national collection of autumn flowering Michaelmas daisies. Continue reading

Is it autumn already?

With leaves changing colour all around us there’s no chance of pretending autumn isn’t on its way. All we can do is to embrace the season and enjoy the show. What’s your favourite plant for autumn colour?

Parthenossisus cinquefolia (Virginia Creeper) is early to colour up.

It’s been an unusual growing year. It began with an apparently very early spring, which turned out not to be spring at all; just a mild spell in winter. The cold and the snow that followed was harsher than anyone would have expected and the winter, far from ending early, dragged on.
Continue reading

Autumn Gardening Tasks

It’s come round to the time of year when the lawn mower morphs from a tool for cutting grass, into a vacuum cleaner for fallen leaves.

Autumn seems to have pounced on us this year. I can trace it back to a day about a week and a half ago, when the air took on a chill, and the heavy dew on the grass lasted the whole day. The trees seemed to start turning in an instant response, with leaves colouring up and beginning to fall.

By then, the asters were barely into bud, but the sudden change seemed to kick them into action, and they’re now fully out and looking good. Asters are pretty much the last summer perennials to flower. When everything else is going over, their leaves are fresh and vital, their intricate daisy flowers in purples, blues, pinks and white, are pristine and vibrant – oases of shining beauty among a sea of decay. If you want to extend your garden’s flowering season into the autumn, you can’t do better than to plant some asters.(1)

Aster novi-belgii ‘Audrey’ – for the bad news, see note (1)

We typically think of autumn as a time of tidying and clearing up – clearing leaves, cutting back dead foliage and flower stems on perennials, pulling up spent bedding plants, taking out tomatoes and cleaning the greenhouse. But it’s also a busy time for more creative tasks. Now is the time to plant spring flowering bulbs, in pots and in the ground. Daffodils need to be planted as soon as possible, but most tulips can wait until November – in fact it’s best not to put them in the open ground until then, particularly if you have heavy soil. It’s a good idea to cover bulbs with wire mesh to stop rodents digging them up (easier to do with pots than for those planted directly into the ground).

Now is a good time to divide many perennials, although some people prefer to wait until the spring to do this, as there’s a danger that the reset plants could be killed by the cold weather. On the other hand, doing it now gives them a chance to establish a good root system, so they’re ready to get growing in the spring. And it’s easier to see what you’re dividing at this time of year, because by the end of the winter, perennials often don’t have much showing above ground.
Aster novi-belgii ‘Climax’ – again, see note (1)

And of course, autumn is a great time to plant roses, as well as most other shrubs, and trees. The soil is still warm (even if the weather isn’t) and reliably moist, giving them a chance to develop their root system so that, as for the perennials, they’re ready to start into growth the following spring. And woody plants can be bought bare-rooted, which is much cheaper than buying potted specimens – particularly relevant if you have a lot of plants to put in (say, for a deciduous hedge).

When it comes to the autumn clearing up, there are decisions to be made. Ideally, fallen leaves can be collected up and made into leaf mould. If you’ve got a lot of leaves, you can make a leaf mould bin by wrapping wire mesh around four wooden posts set out in a square. If you don’t have enough leaves for this, or anywhere to put it, you can fill a black plastic bag with leaves, tie it up, put a few holes in it with a garden fork, and leave it somewhere out of sight. Either way, you should have leaf mould by this time next year.

However, for some plants that are diseased, such as roses with black spot, apples with scab ,or quince with leaf blight, experts suggest collecting the leaves and burning them. The theory is that if you compost them, the spores of the disease may survive and re-infect the plant the following year. The problem comes where your leaves have blown about and intermingled – you can hardly sort them one by one!

The other decision is whether or not to cut back the dead foliage of perennials. Some people can’t bear to see them making the garden look untidy over the winter. Others think that they can look attractive, particularly when the frost is on them, or when they’re backlit by the winter sun. And they do provide homes for insect wildlife to spend the winter. Personally, I tend to wait until the spring to cut back the dead growth.
Canna Neubert, taken only a few days ago – who said the summer was over

(1) In what appears to be an ongoing scheme to make our lives difficult, botanists have recently re-classified some (but not all) asters, and given them the new name ‘Symphyotrichum’. Maybe they’re jealous of our ability to speak horticultural latin. Or perhaps they’re just trying to justify their own existence. It seems to be the later flowering novi-belgii group that have been renamed.


Words and pictures copyright Graham Wright 2017

If Trees Could Talk…

We’re not long into September, and I’d like to think it’s still summer, if only just. But it seems that many of the trees think otherwise. I can’t help feeling a little antagonistic towards them. It’s as if they’re trying to deprive me of what little summer is left; as if they somehow know there isn’t any more good weather to come, so they might as well get on with the autumn business of dropping their leaves. I have an instinctive sense that trees are wise, but in this case it may be less about being in touch with the rhythm of the seasons, and more about giving up regardless. If trees could talk, they’d be saying ‘we’ve had enough!’

My Quince Tree (Cydonia oblonga ‘Vranja’) has suffered a lot this year. In spring, its freshly emerged leaves were ripped to shreds by strong winds. Likewise its second growth. It’s lived through prolonged drought, excessive rain, vastly fluctuating temperatures, and now a long period of dull, humid weather. And now it’s losing its leaves at an alarming rate. Continue reading