Gardening
Late satisfactions
Ursula Buchan
There is a moment, usually about the end of September after a few days of battering rain, when the garden's shaggy scruffiness may begin to irritate. The tobacco plants are leaning, the petunias curled up tight, and the stalks of day lilies poke up unappealingly. Phloxes and gera- niums retain a few brave flowers — almost worse than nothing at all — the roses have lost their freshness and only the border sedums look sturdy and unabashed. There seems little to catch the attention or interest as, resigned to the approaching winter, we sluggishly tidy borders, prune ramblers and lift dahlia tubers.
If this is the case, then it is quite our fault, for autumn is not a passage merely between summer and winter but a proper season — the time of maturity much more than of decay — and with some thought now, next year we need not bemoan the lack of colour and feebly make excuses to stay indoors.
Only confirmed addicts of the craze for conifer gardens could find this season disappointing. The rest of us, unaffected by such exotic nonsense, have the pleasure of flowers, berries and the changing colour of the leaves.
It is easy enough to fill our gardens with the true flowers of autumn for, though seldom planted, they are not hard to find. Ceratostigmas with their bright-blue plum- bago flowers would invite favourable com- ment even in summer, as would the rose- purple bush clover (Lespedeza), and that stalwart of the office foyer, Fatsia japonica,
whose faintly ridiculous creamy-white bob- ble flowers rise up above the large glossy- green leaves. Colchicums, rarely seen but perfectly easy, will settle down in longish grass and flower with the autumn crocuses, and their great fleshy strap leaves could grow there undisturbed and fairly unobtru- sive in the spring.
All too often the gardener's only gesture towards the autumn is to grow Michaelmas daisies. Wherever there is an established garden, there they shall be, in starved and stony soil, their flowers reverted to a dingy lilac, their leaves mildewy-white and limp. 'So useful for the church at Harvest Festiv- al,' we murmur, but they are inclined to make the heart sink with their sickliness and evil colours. We may all profess to be disciples of Gertrude Jekyll, with our 'cottage garden' effects and harmonious colour borders, but few would willingly give over a whole bed to them as she so frequently advocated. However, the new more disease-resistant varieties are worth the trouble of planting in groups, in full sun and fertile soil; if you do not make that effort you will have the flowers — or lack of them — you deserve.
I derive a perverse enjoyment from watching the birds strip the bright berries from cotoneasters or pyracanthas, com- mon shrubs that I can see elsewhere, knowing that they will not touch the pink pearls of Sorbus hupehensils or the red fruits of the crab apple 'Red Sentinel'. Both of them hang on well right till the end of winter.
'It may seem expensive, but 1 had to have a plumber to instal it.'
The atavistic desire we all feel to gather our own food is best satisfied in' autumn. In our garden, a stately walnut bears each year a heavy crop of small but deliciously sweet nuts; that is if the flowers and budding leaves are not burned up by a frost in early May, as they were here the night HMS Sheffield was hit. I find the bossiness of gardeners knows few bounds, for in early July I am invariably urged on all sides to pickle the walnuts before the skins harden. I resist, in order that each October we may go out with boxes to collect the fallen nuts from the ground, their husks now blackened and rotting, in the process staining our hands as brown as a gypsy's. The first of the month, traditionally, is the day that rooks and crows (and for us last year, astonishingly, a raven) settle on the trees when they can still pierce the harden- ing shells to get at the kernels inside. I do not mind, for the work of cleaning away the decaying skins is messy and boring. Berries and fruits are well enough, but It is the turning of the leaves that impresses us most profoundly. As a hard frost threatens in late October, a mildly self- indulgent poignancy enhances the pleasure of watching the changed colouring of trees and shrubs, knowing that tomorrow the leaves will drop. The paperbark maple never lets one down (apart from dying inexplicably), nor does the large-leaved Japanese vine, Vitis coignetiae, that in our garden clutches, with the help of Netlon, the smooth trunk of a tree of heaven. The leaves of both turn a thoroughly satisfac- — tory scarlet.
An enduring childhood memory is the sight and smell of a bonfire of leaves, a thin smoke trailing to the sunlight, although in all honesty it was as often thick acrid white puffs from leaves made damp by soaking autumn rains. But the bonfire is out of , fashion now, as the worry about carci- nogens vies with the equally insistent anxi- ety concerning the development of the compost heap. For it is in autumn that all the fussing with potato peelings, air vents and Garotta pays off as the soil is dug and enriched in preparation for the growing of hardy trees and shrubs.
However much the garden centres may assure us, presumably to spread their sales, that container-growing stock can go in the ground at any time, this is undoubtedly the best season for planting. Everyone knows that it is drought at the roots before they are well-established that kills as manY young plants as anything. You may deluge a new shrub in summer with the contents of the waterbutt till the soil is so wet you could shoot snipe off it, but the tiny rootlets will still die a lingering death when they push out to the dry soil beyond.
Most failures in gardening are due to a lack of foresight. The self-reproach which should accompany dissatisfaction at the appearance of our autumn gardens ought to goad us into planting now. Do so, while the soil is still warm and the watering may safely be left to the English winter.
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