Getting things through the winter

I was checking over my geraniums this week. I've got a few I'm overwintering for myself, plus a few for a couple of clients, and then there's another client who has a whole balcony full of them and needs them all lifting in autumn, overwintering and then setting back out in spring.

You'll hear lots of different methods of overwintering geraniums (I should say, more correctly, pelargoniums), but here's what I do. It's pretty simple.

You take the plants out of the pots they've been in all summer, and pot up in a plastic pot which just fits the roots (i.e. you don't have too much spare soil left over). General-purpose compost is fine - anything too loamy and they get too damp. Then I take the secateurs to them: any leggy stems are cut back to a bud or leaf joint about 4-5" (10cm or so) above soil level. It seems drastic, but it keeps the plants compact as they'll grow again from these points next year instead of starting a foot or two up in the air.

I give them one, very light watering, taking care not to wet leaves or stems, mostly just to settle them in to the pots. And then I switch on the greenhouse heater with the thermostat set to a few degrees above zero, and leave them to it.

I water them maybe twice the whole winter long. There are two secrets to overwintering pelargoniums successfully: first, they need to be very nearly bone dry, so once you've watered them when you transplant them, that's pretty much it until February.

Second, you need to check them over at least once a week and remove any dead or dying leaves and stems. Botrytis, or downy mildew, or whatever that fluffy mould is that grows on dead geranium leaves is murder for overwintering plants and will spread like wildfire. You need to remove the leaves regularly to keep it in check, and take them out of the greenhouse too so the spores aren't hanging around. If you do it regularly, you'll find the fresh leaves will stay fresh and you'll have greenery all winter. Harden them off carefully in early May, when you're sure frosts are past (probably a bit later further north) and you can keep them going for years.

Plant of the month - January

Pyracantha 'Saphyr Jaune'

These little jewels have been cheering up my garden since last autumn. Pyracantha can be the only really bright colour shining through the dull months of winter, and they're all the more welcome for that. The birds have snaffled the red and orange berries already - I have P. 'Saphyr Orange' and P. 'Saphyr Rouge' planted along the same fence, and they're meant to mix 'n' mingle, but the yellow is all that's left. No complaints here, though - I'm just grateful to have such a dainty little sprinkling of colour at this time of year.

Pyracantha is one of those shrubs which is doing something useful all year round. I keep mine trained against the fence - I find they become badly-behaved thugs in the border if left unsupervised. If you're strict with them, though, they behave themselves beautifully. They're one of the few plants which provides evergreen climbing cover all year, and as a sideline are excellent security - climb over a fence clad in pyracantha and you won't forget it in a hurry. As if that wasn't enough, they froth up with flowers in early summer and then sparkle all winter too. I wouldn't be without them.

Outside again at last!

Well after what seems like weeks and weeks of non-stop rain, I'm gardening again!

The water table is still high, but the rain has subsided to a light drizzle and the floods have abated enough to allow me to get a fork into the ground without turning it to mud. I'm back to a full slate of gardens and muddy knees.

This week I was tackling an out-of-control mixed hedge, containing hazel, conifers (not sure exactly what - it's not a strong point of mine, but I think it's some sort of cypress), and various assorted self-seeded things like ash saplings.

I'm all for mixed, aka wildlife hedges - I've got one at the end of my garden which is part adapted from what was already there and part encouraged by transplanting, say, a hawthorn sapling that self-seeded itself where it wasn't wanted. But you do have to keep on top of them or, like most native species, they go mad.

Hazel in particular heads for the sky very quickly indeed. I've got one in my hedge which I keep under very strict control - any stems going in the wrong direction are snipped out right away. I let it grow well above the line of the hedge (I think it makes the hedge more interesting to have plants of different heights from time to time) but I do take out a few of the thickest and tallest branches each year. You can, of course, just shear over the top with hedge-clippers, which is a brutal sort of way of doing it but very effective in keeping it in bounds.

This one in my client's garden, though, was about 50ft high, so that was rather out of the question. In the way that hazels do, it had multi-stemmed and several of the trunks were leaning quite heavily into the main garden. Well - I did the best I could, and pruned back the worst of it into the hedge line again. But in this case, as it's quite a high hedge, I've advised the client to get a tree man in (gardeners aren't qualified, insured, or brave enough, to tackle full-grown trees - it's much better to get a proper arborist in). Hopefully s/he will curb the general skywards tendency and cut it back to just below the top line of the hedge - then it doesn't matter if it sends up some thinner shoots, as I can keep them in a kind of pollard and make them behave themselves.

Sometimes situations just don't comply with the textbooks, and you have to find your own way around.

Disappearing under water

As I write, I'm listening to the sound of a gale howling around my house and the rain splattering the windows with a viciousness which makes you realise why they talk about nasty weather. I've just had to cancel my third garden this week - and that's after last week when I only made it to one of my clients and was washed out for the rest.

There's nothing more depressing than being forced to stay indoors when you don't want to. There's not even anything very nice to look at outside: the path around the greenhouse I've been digging in my garden (of which, hopefully, more later) is now a stream, and when I walked down the garden to let the chickens out I was splashing through the film of water that now covers the lawn. The water table is as high as it's ever been in my normally dry and sandy conditions, and even if it were sunny you'd have to bail out a hole before you could dig it.

I'm sorry - I do try to be optimistic on the whole - but January is, by far, the worst month of the year.

Back to work

At last - the sun is shining, the frost has stopped (for the time being at least) and I can get outside again. I realised this morning that what with a combination of bad weather and Christmas, I only gardened one week in December... that must be some sort of record for me.

One thing I did do in my own garden - which didn't require treading on the frosted grass, which at one point didn't defrost for five days in a row - was to sort out my willow tree. This is the goat willow (Salix caprea) that's by my pond - you can see another picture of it covered rather fetchingly in snow here. You might be able to see from the earlier picture that it was overhanging the fence quite considerably - well on the other side of the fence happens to be my cut flower garden, so it was quite urgent that I take out the overhanging branches and let in a bit more light.

The depths of winter are a great time for pruning trees - you can really see what you're doing, and create a good, balanced outline. You can also get a good look at the general health of the branches, and those which are crossing other branches or generally growing in the wrong direction become very obvious when they're not hidden by leaves. In this case, I aimed for quite a tall, upright shape which was well-balanced but didn't cast too wide a shadow.

When pruning trees, you need to take care not to cut too close to the trunk. If you look at where a side branch leaves the main branch or trunk, you'll see there's an obvious junction. This is called the collar - it appears as a slight swelling between trunk and branch. You should cut on the branch side of the collar - not through it, or on the other side of it, as it contains lots of good hormones which promote the rapid healing of the wound. You can see where I've done this on the big cut facing you in the picture.

It's a good idea too to cut quite close to the collar, as if you leave too much of the branch on the tree, it'll die back and could rot and let in disease - I could have cut fractionally closer here, in fact, and it's not always easy to get it absolutely right. One tip is to cut away the branch little by little, from the far end back towards the trunk, so you get several chances to cut it to exactly the right point.

On the vine

Ornamental grapevines are among the loveliest climbers you can plant. There's something so luxurious about those sculptural leaves draping themselves elegantly over balconies or walls. The grapes themselves aren't much to write home about: they're edible, but quite "pippy" so a novelty rather than a delicacy. But if you choose one of the ones with spectacular autumn colour, like Brandt, you'll be rewarded with wine-dark leaves which glow in low sunshine before tumbling to the floor to be used, pressed flat, in children's autumn collages.

One of my clients has a (non-specific variety) grapevine trained around a double patio window at the back of her house, which is a lovely way of using them as it frames the otherwise rather harsh contours of the window quite nicely. I was out pruning it yesterday: another of the lovely things about grapevines is that they're simplicity itself to prune (I'm talking here about ornamental pruning, where you're not so fussed about the size of your grapes - edible grape pruning is a science in itself, and though I plan to master it some day, it won't be today.)

This is one of the few pruning tasks which you have to complete at the right time. Leave it till much after Christmas and the sap will start rising again - meaning every cut you make will bleed profusely, weakening the plant badly and in a bad case even killing it. I try to prune ornamental grapevines in early December, though it can slip till the end of January in a cold year and you'll be fine.

Then you just work your way along each main stem and take back sideshoots to 2-3 buds. And... er... that's it! You can tip out the main stem too if it's grown as big as you want it (just take it back to about 3" before where last year's brown wood changes to this year's green new growth). It's so satisfying, and the grapevine looks very sculptural after you've finished - if you're feeling festive, hang some baubles or tinsel off it for an instant outdoor Christmas decoration!

Keeping trees in check

I spent a happy hour or two with the chainsaw the other day, converting an ill-advised pollard into a coppice in a client's garden.

The difference between pollarding and coppicing is pretty straightforward, though people tend to get a bit confused in a "stalactites and stalagmites" sort of way. Pollarding is when you allow the tree to develop a single trunk, and then when it's got to the height you want, you cut the leader to that point and allow it to grow new shoots from there. It's good if you want to limit the height of a tree yet allow it to provide some screening too.

Another client has a row of pollarded lime trees growing right the way along the length of her garden: very elegant, and with a little judicious pruning of the inevitable wispy sideshoots that sprout from the trunk from time to time, it's easy to keep them good-looking all year round. Willow also makes a good pollard: a local willow producer grows pollarded willows all along the streams in the field behind his house and harvests the stems each winter for use in basket-weaving.

It doesn't work for all trees, though. The client I visited the other day had tried to pollard a hazel tree, which doesn't lend itself to the process well at all. Hazels sprout like crazy from all up the trunk and from the base as well as soon as you try to limit their growth, meaning you quickly get not an elegant column but more of a bizarre upright hedge effect. In this particular case, the client had allowed one or two of these shoots to develop and pollarded those too, so you ended up with a multi-stemmed pollard, complete with wild beardy clumps on the trunks, if you can imagine such a thing: not a pretty sight.

With hazels it's much better to exploit the naturally multi-stemmed habit and coppice them. This involves cutting the whole tree down to about 6" above ground, which looks drastic, but then next spring it produces a lovely spray of even, whippy shoots to the same height all round, giving a shapely shrub-like effect. You allow this to grow on for 2-3 years, and then do it all over again (and use the wonderful straight stems for beanpoles while you're at it). An alternative, if you don't fancy losing your hazel completely every 3 years, is to take out a third of the stems each year - choose the thickest or any which cross other stems or grow in the wrong direction. That way every three years you'll have rejuvenated the whole coppice anyway.

The coppicing technique can be used to keep otherwise wayward trees like eucalyptus in check (the young leaves it produces when treated this way are fabulous too). And if you coppice willow and dogwood, you'll make the most of the vibrant coloured stems they produce in winter. Pretty and practical, too!

Cruelty to plants

Look what I discovered when I was clearing a neglected bit of shrubbery at a client's garden the other day.

Now, call me soppy, but I really wince when I see plants in pain like this. What's happened is that a little sapling of some pretty little ornamental tree has been planted and then, quite correctly, supported with a stake and a proper tree tie.

Trouble is, nobody came back to visit it. For years, from the looks of the poor thing. It was half the size it should have been, and then there's that awful scar.... Well, I had great pleasure from tearing out that tree tie from the groove it had gouged in the bark, and imagining the sap rising at last (well, next spring anyway) free from such terrible restrictions.

So let this be a lesson to us all: go and check your tree ties! Loosen them gradually if they need it, though trees shouldn't need supporting after the first two or three years so you can take them right off (and remove the stake) after this length of time. Your trees will thank you.

Plant of the month - November

Cynara cardunculus

Cardoon

In the depths of winter when there's little else to entertain, this is a marvellous change from the usual evergreen blobs. Massive architectural stems hold aloft these sculptural pincushions right through the worst of the weather. Even better are the downy tufts of golden fluff that sit inside, adored by the birds for winter nest material, and beautiful when the sun catches them, too. They're mostly gone by this time of year - though you can see some of the effect here:

As you can see, the resident flock of bluetits (and sparrows, and starlings, and robins...) have had their chunk, but isn't that butterscotch yellow gorgeous against a blue winter sky?

As if all that wasn't enough, cardoons hold a rosette of serrated, sword-shaped slate-green leaves at the base all winter, which then develop into even more stately beauty next year. I love cardoons at any time, but now they take centre stage and I appreciate them more than any other plant in the garden. You can't ask for more than that.

Out with the old...

...and in with the new. Having lost my lovely woodland garden in the hills, I've been able to say "yes" to a new client, someone who's been very patiently waiting for me for nearly a year now. So I have a new garden to look after - always exciting as you come across something you haven't dealt with before every time.

I'm starting for her regularly in the New Year, but I went in for a half-day clear-up the other day just to get a feel for the garden. My new charges this time include an unbelievable climbing rose, at least 20 years old and with a trunk the thickness of a small elephant's leg. They've had a problem with it as it was tied a bit haphazardly to the front of the house and blew off in the wind, so is now rather butchered to keep it within bounds. Time to get out my drill and vine eyes, and do a lot of persuading that this time it will work (honest, guv...)

The other large and very old shrub I'm looking forward to caring for is a Japanese quince - I'll try to take a photo of it and post it in spring, as it's the biggest Japanese quince I've ever seen, too.

I spent a while thinning it out as there was an enormous amount of dead wood in the middle - these are quite untidy shrubs when they're just left to grow, so they're usually trained to a wall, but in this case I can see why the client didn't want to as it's clearly going to be absolutely spectacular in flower. It had spread quite widely out from where it was meant to be so the clump needed reducing a bit. Hopefully though I haven't done too thorough a job, and it'll still be able to wow us all next year.

Rake's progress

My desert-island garden tool - the one I'd never be without - is of course my pair of Felco secateurs, which don't often see the toolshed as they're almost always in my back pocket.

A close second, though, has to be my bamboo spring-tined lawn rake. Now, you'd have thought a spring-tined rake with a wooden head has to be in the same category as the chocolate teapot in the ideas stakes - but actually it works beautifully.

It's not as rough as a metal spring-tined rake, so you can collect leaves from lawns without actually pulling up the lawn itself while you're at it. And you can use the flexible bamboo hooks on the ends of the tines to tease leaves out of the crowns of shrubs, where otherwise they'd form a noxious rotting mess by spring, without actually damaging the shrubs themselves at all. Plastic ones come close for effectiveness, but quite apart from the aesthetics - I do hate plastic garden tools - I've never found one that doesn't crack after a few seasons' use. Yet my humble wooden one is still going strong after seven years of hard labour.

I was given mine, and have since found that none of the main manufacturers in the UK make them - the honourable exception being JB Bentley's Traditional Tool range. I have to say though mine is a bit better looking - you can see a pic of one just like it here. It may look a bit retro, but it really is the biz.

First frost of the year

We had the first really hard frost of the year last night - down to minus 7 degrees, which is pretty low for any time of the year in this part of the world. We've had a couple of minor ground frosts in the last few weeks, but this one has really sent temperatures plummeting.

I love frosty nights, mainly because they're almost always followed by a day of glorious winter sunshine which makes the garden sparkle as if it's been dusted with diamonds. I've left as many of the seedheads on this year as I felt I could, and it's in these conditions that they really reward you for it: the ones in the picture are Helenium "Moorheim Beauty", which were beginning to go a bit soggy and brown but have been transformed this morning by their frosting of mini-icicles.

Leaving seedheads on à la Piet Oudolf can be a bit hit-and-miss, I find. Some are strong enough to cope, but others (even ones Mr Oudolf recommends) collapse very quickly into a rather uninspiring mass of damp bobbles. A client of mine has an otherwise lovely clump of Rudbeckia, which are supposed to stand most of the winter, but despite my exhortations to last at least until Christmas I think I'm going to have to tidy them up in a week or so as they look just awful at the moment.

The lovely fluffy puffballs that adorn my cardoons (Cynara cardunculus) on the other hand have been wonderful - the birds think so, too, as everything from great tits to starlings have been tugging great clumps of fluff out of them to line their winter quarters with. I've got another flock of bluetits which have been stripping the seeds off the Stipa gigantea (which has been truly gorgeous this year - you can see why everyone raves about this fabulous grass). They also perch precariously on the wildly-waving bobbles of Verbena bonariensis to feast on the seeds inside: now this is one plant which stands bravely no matter what the weather, though I think mine are about to lose their heads if the birds carry on the way they are. It may be winter, but it's not boring.

Autumn mulching

At this time of year I get nothing short of obsessed by leaves. And I don't mean just the lovely autumn colours - and this is a particularly lovely autumn, with oranges, reds, yellows and golds gleaming in the sunshine.

Leaves are my no.l free resource in the garden, and I'm constantly amazed how many people still pile 'em up and burn 'em. Leafmould might take a couple of years to rot down - but all the best things come to those who wait, and when you unwrap that old leafmould bin that's been sitting in the corner of your garden doing nothing for I don't know how long, you remember why you did it.

I've been doing just that this week in my garden, with a bin I've had stewing now since 2005, and my goodness it's beautiful stuff. Dark, crumbly, and smelling of the forest floor.

Leafmould is a low-nutrient organic matter, which means you can safely use it at this time of year without worrying about stimulating plants into new growth just as the frosts arrive. You can mix it in with compost and sand to make a home-made potting mix, but I find that all a bit fiddly (even though it does save lots of money). I prefer just to use leafmould as an autumn mulch, tucking in my plants for the winter and keeping any stray annual weeds at bay (yes they do keep germinating even through the coldest months of the year). As well as looking great, it'll be pulled down into the soil by the worms and bulk out my sandy loam - so it can hold in moisture more efficiently next summer, too. And people burn this stuff?!

Plant of the month - October

Cosmos "Purity"

This is perhaps the most lovely of all the annuals, a real ballerina of a flower. The whitest of white petals - purity really does describe it perfectly - stretch with yearning up to the sun on wiry stems dancing above the featheriest of foliage. For all its delicacy, this is a tough plant that thrives on pretty much any soil: if you have poorer soil, the stems are shorter and it doesn't need staking. This one is in my cutting garden, for these make the most spectacular and beautiful flowers for a vase and go with just about anything. It's such a generous plant, too: the more you cut the flowers, the more the plant produces. I have Cosmos most of the year, as I sow in March for flowers in the usual month of June-July, and do a second sowing in July for flowers still going strong at this time of year. They don't come more perfect than this.

Saying goodbye

One of the occupational hazards of being a professional gardener is that you end up having to say goodbye to people you've become very fond of, and to gardens you've nurtured and got to know well.

That's happening to me at the moment - my lovely woodland garden (the one with all the rhododendrons - see here and here... and here.... I've been there a long time!) is going to go to another owner. The current owner says he's moving before Christmas, so I have a month or two yet I think, but it's a funny feeling - rather than making plans on how to bring the garden forward year on year, I'm now just keeping it tidy and ticking over until the next person arrives. Worse - I've become really fond of the current owner, who's a lovely man and very kind and gentle. He's elderly, so needs somewhere smaller and more manageable, but I shall miss him.

It's taken me by surprise how much the people who own gardens reflect on the qualities of the gardens themselves. I've looked after just one garden for someone I didn't get on with - and I didn't like the garden either. This one was a little sterile and overgrown when I first arrived, but over the year I've been getting it gradually into shape so it has more movement and life in it now. In just the same way, I've taken time to get to know the owner, but gradually he's become a friend as well as a client.

Gardening really is about people as much as it is about plants...

Season of mists...

There's a definite autumn tinge to the air now. It's been misty the last couple of days and the leaves are just turning that russety shade of brown that means any minute now we'll be out with the leaf rakes and collecting what seems like tons of the things.

Which is why I've been sorting out the leafmould bins for one of my clients. She has a fabulous big woodland garden, full of lovely mature natives like beech, oak and whitebeams (one of the loveliest trees if you have a chalky soil - it has silver undersides to its leaves). Unfortunately, though she has two massive leafmould bays, they were full of roots and half falling down, so they took a lot of work to get functioning again!

I'm there now though, after a couple of sessions of digging out a mixture of nettle and tree roots and sorting out the rotted stuff - some many years old - from the new leaves which had been dumped on top. Now I have two bays, about 10ft x 10ft (I told you it was a big garden) made of posts driven into the ground with green wire chainlink fencing round it. You need plenty of air in a leafmould bin to make good mould, so things like compost bins, with more solid sides, don't work: chainlink fences are ideal and last for years, though you have to have strong uprights which are well driven into the ground as the weight of the leaves can be enormous.

Now I have lots of lovely old leafmould to spread as a mulch on her borders. It makes a great autumn mulch as it's low in nutrients so won't spur plants on to put out unseasonally tender growth, and it still adds plenty of organic matter to the soil (desperately needed on her thin chalk). One of the many good reasons to have a garden in the woods!

Horrible diseases

Here's something to strike fear into your heart: first box blight laid waste to our clipped hedge topiaries, then it was sudden oak death threatening the most English tree of them all. Now that stalwart of the English garden, the fuchsia, is under threat from a new bug, the fuchsia gall Mite.

It's been spotted in Hampshire and causes twisted, distorted growth at the end of fuchsia shoots and branches. Let's hope it doesn't get much further - fuchsias may not be my favourite plant, but they're good-looking, dead easy to look after, I grow lots of them in various gardens and we'd all be poorer without them.

Plant of the month - September

Leycesteria formosa

Pheasant berry

This has to be the best value shrub in my garden. Just now the purple berries are starting to darken to almost black, bringing this year-rounder to its peak. The year starts with brilliant green leaves emerging: later in the summer they develop a purplish tinge. The flowers start appearing early - about June - in fountains of raspberry ice bracts held demurely under the leaves, each one harbouring a tiny, relatively insignificant white flower. The flowers, though, develop into these fabulous, luscious berries which last well into autumn - unless, of course, you have pheasants in the area, in which case you'll be besieged. The interest lasts through winter, too, as the vibrant green stems stand right through till spring. All this for the price of a little pruning in spring (remove about a third of the oldest branches to keep the youngest, brightest stems) - this is truly a plant which has it all.

Cloud-pruning hedges

One of my clients has an accidentally cloud-pruned hedge. This arcane art from Japan is all the rage at the moment, but when I informed her she was cutting edge (literally and metaphorically), she'd never heard of it. The hedge, she told me, had just grown like that: she and her husband had been pruning it with shears since they moved in about 50 years ago and they just followed the contours of the hedge without bothering too much about straight lines and sharp edges.

It's a lovely thing: all curves and sensual, billowing waves. It takes me eight hours to prune it with hand shears each year, which is a real labour of love, but it's worth it. You can see bits of it swelling and retreating as the years go by: holes appear and disappear, and bulges are smoothed out and then turn up somewhere else. I've never been so aware that a hedge is made up of living, breathing plants: beats a boring old box square any day.

Back again!

No prizes for guessing where I've been!

What precious seconds I've had to spare this summer in between juggling small children on school holiday and the normal demands of work have been spent out in the garden dodging the raindrops, so my computer has remained lonely and neglected in the corner. Now though with autumn in the air and everything beginning to wind down, and - most importantly perhaps? - the kids back at school, it's time to catch up with what's been going on!

Verdict on this summer - a washout, and I think everyone agrees. It hasn't been much fun for anyone on the beach, but I think it's been fantastic for the garden despite misery-guts moaning about floppy perennials from telly gardeners. That just hasn't been my experience at all: the roses have been flowering fit to bust, having for once in their lives had enough water all summer in my thin sandy soil; my Amelanchier - which I shouldn't really be growing since it's from the American wetlands - has put on a foot of growth; and I haven't had to pick up the hosepipe once. After the horrors of last year's drought, I've been revelling in this summer: the light may have made it hard to catch the flowers at their shining best, but they really have been at the best I've ever seen them. And a few wet pairs of gardening gloves is a small price to pay for that.