It’s November and we’ve just had two weeks of what is known as anticyclonic gloom and it’s produced warm, still grey days that weigh down the soul. In fact, sun has been in short supply all year round here and the plants have definitely noticed. My nerines, for instance, have failed to put on their usual autumn flourish and some bulbs haven’t even put out foliage. Today though, it’s clear and bright and that means one thing fellow gardeners – colder nights. We’re entering the zone of uncertainty, because we don’t know what winter’s going to throw at us.
My frost-breaking heater is set up and whirring. The electric propagators are on and the bubble wrap is at hand. This lightweight, see-through material is much more effective than fleece in winter – and cheaper too. All I’ve got to do now is remember to go up there, morning, noon and night, to check that the pelargoniums and other tender cuttings are moist, but not wet. I need to remove any for fluffy grey mould, or botrytis, and take away the spent foliage for this November has been warm and that encourages mould.
If I can manage the plants successfully now, I’ll be potting up my tender cuttings in late January or early February. And then I can breathe easy once again, because the critical ‘killer’ zone is behind me. If I forget to check them, or I’m out for a day, anything may happen. If it’s sunny for the next few weeks, temperatures under glass could rise sharply during the day so the door will need to be open between 11.00am and 2.30pm. As night beckons, the temperature plummets sharply, so sunny winter days can produce a 20C difference. Plants hate extremes: they enjoy the status quo, and daytime heat kills more cuttings than anything else does. They fry as crisply as a Macdonald’s chip. And then they die!
We’re a hard group to please, we gardeners. It’s either too hot, too cold, too gloomy, too wet or too windy and climate change is producing weather that’s just too, too and more-too of everything. That’s due to an unstable jet stream and it produced a record-breaking savage December in 2010, because the jet stream moved further south than usual and drew in arctic air straight from Greenland.
That year it fell to me lock the village church and I had to wade a quarter of a mile through deep snow, the sort of snow that had stranded cars and shut schools all over Gloucestershire. It was the coldest December since Met Office records began and it broke the previous record in December 1981. I lost a large clump of Kniphofia rooperi, because this autumn-flowering knihopfia has evergreen foliage. Leafy plants, with an evergreen tendency, are more vulnerable because they’re less hardy. In 2010, we went from a warm November straight into a freezing December and the plants didn’t have any time to produce their own antifreeze. Many gardeners lost plants.
November sees me cloching, or wrapping, my leafy kniphofias with fleece and bubble wrap. I’ll be lifting some things too, including the double-pink Lychnis ‘Gardeners World’ (now re-named Silene), Diascia personata and Salvia ‘Amistad’. They’ll get potted up and put in the heated greenhouse for winter because a hard Cotswold winter will kill them if they stay in the ground.
There are always plants to lift and divide. In the days when mail order plants were the only ones available, it was easy to know when to do it. Plants that flowered in summer, rather than autumn, were divided in autumn and sent out for autumn planting. These included phloxes, achilleas, campanulas and astrantias. Anything that flowered in late-summer or autumn was left intact until spring and, once new foliage appeared, it was divided and sent out in March or April. Never divide straight after flowering: give your plants time to regroup.
Wetter winters are muddying more than the soil however. September divisions are getting too wet and dying off. If you’re on clay soil, planting and dividing should be done in spring these days, although you may have to water in dry springs. I rarely plant in September, because wet weather does not encourage root development. A cold frame is a godsend at this time of year, because it keeps your plants on the drier side so they are forced to put down roots.
The main job this year is to remove some perennial sunflowers, or Helianthus. These are yellow daisies and they flower from August onwards. They are a mixed bunch, because some are well-behaved clump formers and others march across the garden with speed. Ones to avoid, unless you want or need a thorough thug, are ‘Miss Mellish’ and ‘Gullick’s Variety’. Read most nursery sites and they will describe both as clump formers. Hah: that’s not my experience and, should you ever have cause to dig some up, the roots resemble policeman’s feet!
I grow two here and I wrote about them this September. ‘Sheila’s Sunshine’ is a very tall lemon-yellow, rising to 3m at times. I’m a lowly 1.65m, so I can’t actually see Sheila’s overhead flowers. Worse, still her flowers turn their backs on me because sunflowers always chase the sun. In my south-facing garden they look away from the house – and me. I need to go in the field to see them.
‘Sheila’s Sunshine’ is described by many a nursery man as clump-forming. Not here, she’s not. She’s roamed far and fast, so Sheila will be escorted off the premises within days, despite the fact that she came from Graham Gough’s when he had his wonderful nursery – Marchant Plants. She’s off in a barrow, sorry Graham, although I’m toying with the idea of putting some pieces in the village fete!
‘Lemon Queen’, probably the best perennial helianthus to grow, is off to a larger garden near Burford. I’ve grown her for decades, because I can admire the flowers, without using a stepladder, and they are not quite as willing to turn their backs away from me. There’s a shorter form (which I haven’t grown) called ‘Carine’, but it’s still five feet tall apparently.
‘Lemon Queen’ was raised by Tommy Carlile at his Loddon Nursery near Twyford in Berkshire. Tommy gave many plants the Loddon pre-fix and there’s Campanula lactiflora ‘Loddon Anna’, Anchusa ‘Loddon Royalist’ and Heliopsis ‘Light of Loddon’. These centurions are still grown today. Tommy was known for his cheerful disposition and his colourful floral display on so-called Tommy’s Corner on the A4. He exhibited at the first Chelsea Flower Show of 1912 and didn’t miss one thereafter until he died on August 13th 1957. His displays used to stop the traffic.
My roses need attention too. I always take the weight out at the end of October, because this garden’s windy and roses with lots of leaf rock about in the wind. This creates a gap by the root and that allows rain to funnel down and freeze the roots. Start by removing the 3 DS, the deadwood, the diseased and the dying. It’s easy to spot once the rose is bare because the wood will be a dull brown and not a shiny green.
Die back happens when the cut is made too far above the bud. A quarter of an inch is ideal and you slant the cut downwards, away from the bud, to allow the water to drain away. Take your time and be accurate. And that’s a memo to self by the way. Once you done the 3 Ds, it’s time to consider the rose. If it’s a hybrid tea it can be cut back hard to a few inches, always to an outward-facing bud. Floribundas are less hardy and less vigorous and they are normally taken down to between 12 and 18 inches. Prune any lower and they can succumb in hard winters, as I know to my own cost. Older roses and most English roses, the latter raised by David Austin, need a lighter pruning regime and a third of each stem is normally removed. If you’re unsure look at the vigour of the rose.
Making cuts just above outward-facing buds allows the new growth to go in an outward-facing direction, because the whole idea of pruning is to create an open cup shape that allows the air to pass through. You may have to remove some inward-facing stems and it’s a good idea to take out any spindly growth. If a whole branch is very woody, use a pruning saw to remove it. Felco make the best.
Tidy up any leaves to prevent black spot disease. Once the buds begin to break next spring, feed your roses with Vitax Q4, a high potash feed that you can use on fruit, hellebores and peonies. It’s cheaper than rose food and does the same job.
I can feel summer edging nearer already……………….