GARDENS
ANNA TAYLOR, OWNER OF ANNA’S FLOWER FARM IN AUDLEY END, SHARES WHAT’S GOING ON IN THE GARDEN THIS MONTH
s autumn sets in, October sees mixed weather conditions; warm southerly winds whisper memories of the previous months
and early morning mists, storms and dark evenings pre-empt what’s to come. In our area, frosts might come as early as late October, but while the month is chilly and changing, it is usually still reasonably mild. This is the perfect time to maintain the lawn. Collect up fallen leaves and store in bags or a chicken wire frame out of the way, and allow them to slowly decay through the winter. Rake the turf, removing any moss, and scrape the soil back a little. A vigorous job for a dry day is to aerate grass roots by pricking the soil down to 5cms depth with a garden fork – do this over the entire lawn to de-compact heavy soils. When you’re done, sprinkle grass seed and a dusting of topsoil or loam over the holes or gaps and the grass will quickly get away with the warm soils and autumn rain. Granted it will look an absolute mess, but it will give you a beautiful lawn next spring. This month, I bring in tender plants including aeoniums, pelargoniums and succulents and complete my least favourite job in the garden, bulb planting. It’s a task with nothing to immediately show for
it, simply hiding bulbs beneath the soil. However, I do love seeing stems pushing optimistically through frozen soil with a promise of new flowers and, invariably, I wish I’d planted more! This year, I am going to grow fritillaria uva-vulpis with its glaucous foliage and little nodding brown and yellow flowers that last well in the vase, and muscari in shades of true blue. This grape hyacinth has a poor reputation for taking over the spring border but buy species bulbs such as muscari aucheri ‘ocean magic’ in pale spring blue or bicoloured muscari latifolium in true blue and dark inky navy and you won’t regret it. These also look great with the diminutive narcissus bulbocodium; a small, sunny yellow, bell-like flower. I plant up pots with these to grace outdoor tables so I can closer enjoy the delicate plants, then remove to a hidden spot as they die down after flowering.
In the garden now, we are also enjoying autumn favourites, such as rudbeckia ‘Sahara’, which is a delicious mix of cappuccino-coloured blooms and blush pinks through to rusty browns and oranges. They are both gaudy and chic, but robust both in the border and vase. This month is the best in the year for cutting and arranging. I enjoy the different textural elements I can use from fennel seed heads, fluffy flowers of calamagrostis brachytricha grasses and spikes of persicaria amplexicaulis ‘firetail’. I grow a lot of crocosmia, not really for the arches of orange flowers but more for the bulbous seed heads that come afterwards. These are all long-flowering garden stalwarts. They add so much more interest, both in the border and the vase, than at any other time of the year, setting off arrangements of dahlias or and branches of seeds, nut and rosehips beautifully.
“Invariably I wish I’d planted more”
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C A M B S E D I T I O N . C O . U K
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