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.

Hedging your bets

The year rolls on... now it's time to dust off the hedgetrimmers and get to work. A week or so ago it was a client's privet hedge, now it's the beech hedge round our front garden and the wildlife hedge at the back.

I'm more than a bit proud of our beech hedge. We planted it ourselves, about 4 years ago after we'd grubbed up a horrid leylandii hedge. Being me, I didn't do things by halves: I dug a big trench, poured barrowloads of manure in to improve the soil, then planted my staggered rows of beech saplings 18" apart and back-filled. Then I watered them in very, very well and mulched deeply with well-rotted stable manure.

So far, so what most people do. But ever since, I've taken care of the hedge in just the same way as my perennials: I think perhaps this is where people go wrong, in that they forget that hedges are groups of plants, not just inanimate walls, and have the same needs. So I watered the hedge in the droughts, mulched it every spring, and kept it free of weeds.

Result: a four-year-old hedge which looks like it's been there 10 years. Beech hedges are notoriously slow to establish, and the books say you shouldn't expect a dense hedge until at least 5 years. Ours took three: and I'm convinced it's because I took good care of the plants, and am continuing to do so. We're reaping the rewards now: all that hard work has really paid off, and my little beech trees are thanking me in the only way they know how!

Camellia problems

I was up in the 3/4 acre woodland garden I look after the other day, and cutting back a camellia which was overhanging the pathway quite badly (this is the kind of thing I spend most of my time doing in this particular garden - the amount of green waste I remove from there has to be seen to be believed!)

I noticed pretty quickly that behind the curtain of fresh green leaves there was a problem. All the older leaves were covered in a sticky, black sooty mould, which not only looked nasty but also couldn't have been doing the shrub much good.

I wasn't quite sure myself what was causing it - I thought aphids of some sort, since this is what causes it on roses (the aphids secrete honeydew, which drips on the leaves below and is consequently colonised by the fungal sooty mould). I was a bit unsure about this since I've never heard of aphids attacking camellias to any great degree.

Anyway - I came back and looked it up, and thanks to the dear old RHS I discovered we almost certainly have not aphids, but Camellia cushion scale.

I have to go back and check whether there are yellow-brown scale insects near the veins (or indeed "white waxy egg masses"). But everything else fits.

The good news is, this is just the right time of year to control it. I'm going to have to spray; I'll try the organic version first (Growing Success Bug Killer or Vitax Organic 2in1) and if that doesn't work, I'll zap it with the very un-environmentally friendly Provado. My client tells me he has a backpack sprayer in his garage (the shrub is about 15ft tall) - so time to tog up and do battle!

Choice choisya

Another good shrub for cutting back at this time of year is Choisya ternata "Sundance". About now those lovely sunny yellow leaves which lifted your spirits through the worst of the winter weather turn a pale washed-out shade of sickly. It's time to prune them off and allow the new, green growth to come through and turn yellow in its place. It also gives the bush a lovely rounded shape for next winter, as the new growth comes through in nice neat rosettes and all stays the same length, more or less.

It's pretty simple - just take the secateurs and trim down to the next rosette of leaves, usually about 6" or so down the stem. If there isn't a rosette, just trim out the whole stem. You don't need to cut it back hard: just shape it to the size you'd like and leave it.

Choisya is one of the few shrubs you can hack back without ruining the appearance: though it does change colour temporarily, from yellow to green, a healthy plant carries enough leaves in the centre of the bush to keep it looking nice and dense. After you've finished, give it a feed of pelleted chicken manure and a good water and mulch, and it'll be set fair to keep you smiling in winter all over again.

The things you see out gardening...

I was happily laying into an overgrown cotoneaster in the big country garden I look after this morning when I heard a low humming noise.

I thought at first it was a bug flying around my ears so I was swatting away when the hum got louder. And louder. Finally it occurred to me to look up, and there was the biggest swarm of bees I've ever seen. Actually, the only swarm of bees I've ever seen.

They came up the hill from the open fields behind, a great big black cloud of them, making that insistent, purposeful drone as they came. I watched in awe as they flew overhead and made for the far side of the garden (thank goodness - I had momentary panics over what I'd do if they decided I looked interesting). I looked for them later but couldn't see them - not sure what I'd have done if I had, to be honest.

It all prompted me to look into this funny business of swarming. Funnily enough, the first place I found was a local council not far from me, at Elmbridge. Here's what they had to say:

"Colonies totalling as many as 20,000 bees can and will swarm. The noise of a bee swarm can be alarming but the danger is not very great. The swarming bees will cluster, possibly on a tree branch, and should be collected by an experienced beekeeper (contact your local Environmental Health Department or the police if a beekeeper is not known to you). Honeybees can sting, especially if you venture close to their hive. "

Apparently honeybees swarm, but bumblebees don't. And I discovered a whole website dedicated to informing people about honeybee swarms, at Swarms.net: here's what they say:

"Honey bees swarm to multiply the number of colonies and thus propagate and perpetuate the species. By division of the bee stocks in the hive, those left behind have honey stores, and along with young bees about to hatch is a young queen in her special cell.

The bees that swarm with the old queen do not go far from the hive. Maybe because queen bees do not fly as well or as fast as workers! They will move on from each resting spot until a new home is found. (Or until a beekeeper collects them and puts them into a new hive.)

Swarms can survive for a number of days on the honey stores they filled themselves with before leaving the hive. As the days pass they will be more upset when approached - hence its important to get a beekeeper to collect them quickly. "

You learn new things every day... hope whoever finds their swarm when it finally settles gets some nice honey out of it!

Hacking at lilacs

This is a great time of year for cutting back overgrown shrubs, especially spring-flowering ones. Lilac is a prime target, as well as evergreen ceanothus, berberis, pyracantha... pretty much anything that doesn't flower later this year, really.

I spent a couple of hours laying into a client's lilac last week. It must have been 20 years old, and about that long since it was last looked at: it was heavily congested in the centre and the 4" thick branches were splaying outward and endangering his shed. And it was about 25-30ft tall, which would have been fine in a big garden but his is a small-ish suburban strip.

I like to think of this kind of pruning as rejuvenating pruning - though it also counts as common-or-garden hacking back. What you do is remove about a third to a half of the wood - taking out the thickest, oldest branches first, and then any which are pointing in the wrong direction, as well as any which are diseased and/or dead, of course. If you're me, you find it hard to know when to stop, especially with lilacs: when they're overgrown, they tend to develop long, leggy stems with the leaves and flowers right at the very end, and that means once you've taken out the bulk of the shrub, you're left with some rather sad-looking whippy lengths of wood waving around in the breeze. It all looks very odd.

Fear not: this is quite normal. The thing to do is to leave it looking a bit wierd this year, and wait until the stump starts pushing up new growth, which it will do very quickly. Then next year you can cut out another third of the long whippy old wood; and by the third year, when the new growth has got to a decent height and will be flowering well, you can take out the last third to be left with a bush that's all the same height, hopefully a nice shape and full of strapping young growth which looks far nicer and is much more healthy.

The Wisley glasshouse

One of the great privileges I have with my garden writers' hat on is that I get to go to sneak previews - and last night I went along to the unveiling of the new glasshouse at RHS Wisley, which opens to the public for the first time today.

Since I'm such a regular visitor to Wisley, I've been watching this amazing structure going up gradually over the years, and went along to another press bash in February to see it as the planting went in - well, then it was almost entirely under water after a winter of torrential rain, and we were all taking bets on whether it would be ready in time to open.

We needn't have worried. It's quite amazing what they've done in the four months since then: it still looks very "new", and the planting outside (designed by Tom Stuart-Smith) is just in so will take some to show what it's made of: but inside it is breathtaking. It's going to be wonderful watching it grow over the months and years to come.

Here it is: a little stark, perhaps, until the exterior landscaping develops, but a remarkable structure nonetheless. It was designed in Holland, and doubles-up as a water collection system.

At the centre is a magnificent waterfall - you walk behind it as you pass from the temperate side into the tropical. The rock is artificial, and hides a "root zone" exhibit underneath.

There were orchids in the palm trees: I wasn't quite sure if they were there for our benefit, or if they're going to stay! They looked fantastic, anyway.

And then there were the plants... these Philodendron leaves were up to two feet long and that soft, velvety texture was so utterly gorgeous. And this is just a baby plant...

Outside in Cleve West's teaching garden, there were loads of great ideas - I'm going to nick this fantastic birch-log path for the jungle area around my pond.

Flopping around

Another little job that always gets the better of me every year is the staking.

In my defence, I will say I keep trying to grow new things and then discovering too late that they are the kind of things that flop in an ungainly way over everything around them once they get to flowering. Last year it was Aster "Climax" (now moved to the cutting garden); this year it's a big clump of Anthemis tinctoria "Kelwayii", a brassy yellow daisy with profuse, pretty flowers which I grew from seed last year. I planted three as young plants, but they didn't do much last year, despite being touted as first-year-flowering perennials - I suspect though it might have been to do with my thin soil rather than anything else. Anyway, this year they've shot up, to about 4ft tall, and as soon as they formed flower buds they promptly crashed to the ground.

Sadly for the hemerocallis behind, to say nothing of the poppies all around and a hellebore or two, floppy plants mean crushed neighbours and a bare centre where the clump has fallen outwards. It's extremely unsightly and very bad for the border.

As usual, I've done a sticking-plaster job - really tricky this time as unlike the Aster, the Anthemis is near the front of the border. Actually I'm quite pleased with how it's gone: I had some old plant supports someone gave me, real instruments of bondage with five vicious-looking wire "arms" which until now had flummoxed me as to how to use them. Fortunately they sink nicely into the ground and the arms hold up the Anthemis nicely. Situation saved: but, like the Aster, the Anthemis are now earmarked for an alternative home next year!

Back to the wall

I've been giving my ceanothus a haircut this week, as it's trained against a fence and needs an annual prune to keep it tidy.

Wall-training shrubs which are otherwise inclined to get a bit big and unwieldy is a great way to keep them in bounds. Ceanothus is a good candidate, and so is Japanese quince (Chaenomeles japonica), pyracantha and Garrya elliptica. The small-leaved cotoneaster, C. horizontalis, holds itself so rigid it practically stands up against a wall by itself, without supports.

The principle is pretty straightforward: you'll need supports, such as wires spaced about a foot to 18" apart, to train the shrub onto before you start.

Then, year by year, you shape the shrub so it's flat against the wall. You do this just after flowering: just prune out any branches growing out away from the wall completely or, if you're at risk of ending up with bare stems, you can prune back to one or two leaf joints from the stem.

Tie in side shoots pointing the way you want them to go, and then trim any upward-growing stems to about an inch (2.5cm) below the top of the fence or wall. If any longer side shoots are growing beyond the bounds you want them to keep to, shorten them, too.

Pyracantha in particular makes a really lovely espalier if you do this: ceanothus is a bit more bushy, so you get a pleasing evergreen "coat" to disguise your fence with. In any case, you avoid the problem you get with climbers where they're forever climbing next door, or over the neighbouring shrubs; and it looks great, too.

Home-made perfume

One of the sidelines of my cutting garden is left over from its previous incarnation as a herb garden: I've got a row of plants specifically dedicated to producing perfume.

At the moment - since the whole thing got interrupted so wasn't completed properly - it consists only of English lavender and Apothecary's Rose (Rosa gallica officinalis). The rose is currently flowering its head off and so I'm gathering the petals and drying them on a shelf in the shady corridor that runs from one back door to the other, between my office and the kitchen. It might sound like an odd place for drying flowers, but in fact it fulfils all the main requirements in that it's shady, cool and there's a draught running through it regularly.

At the moment I'm not quite sure what I shall do with the dried petals: I could make simple rose-petal pot pourri, which just means dried rose petals in a bowl. That would be nice, but I'm not sure how long it will last. What I'd really like to do is to make wet pot pourri - the type for which it is named (it literally means "rotten pot"!). This involves packing layers of petals which have been dried for just two days in a big crock with rock salt. Unfortunately since the pot needs to be clay or similar (i.e. not see-through) I've got a problem sourcing one - large glass jars are relatively easy to find, but big clay crocks went out with my grandma. The search begins!