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 he garden should not be put to bed too early like naughty child or an ailing aunt. The habit of assuming that because autumn has arrived wearing her veil of mists and necklaces of frosted dew we must cut everything down and make the borders neat and tidy is a bad habit. Indeed, to do so is to deprive ourselves of yet another most magical season.
Of course, the autumn clean should be encouraged. It is sound practice to remove the temporary supports of canes and twigs. It is good husbandry to clear away dead or dying leaves, the debris of any bedding, the mess sweet peas have become and those rampant self-seeders such as nepeta and alchemilla, all of whom die ungracefully. |
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But we must not be obsessive about it, for there are advantages in being discriminating, discerning with our shears and secateurs.
The garden in winter can be a sculptural wonderland of frosts and mists. Plants that sleep standing in their boots will, in season and in their time, wear white caps of snow. A huddle of unslaughtered yarrow would be skeined together with the gossamer silks of spiders' webs frozen like hanging tatters of lace. The globed seedheads of echinops and alliums, if left aloft, will be coronets and crowns in your garden. That other seeding thug, fennel, can have its wicked head cut off, but the skeletal frames, when the fronds have been frozen to frap, are beautiful, rising from the mellow mists of autumn or half seen through a fog. |
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 ost ornamental grasses reach their climax in autumn, of course. They flower - if that is what their feathers and tails, fronds and fans are - on the cusp of summer. Because their show is so late they beg, surely, to be left so displays can be frozen stiff. Their leaves become russet fountains, their bodies bronzed mounds. When the wind is up they swish a lullaby. When rimed with ice, if you stand close, they whisper among themselves. Seedheads are tiny semi-precious stones, and valued as such. |
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The deciduous climber celastrus has by now produced spherical green fruits that are ripening into an almost blackish brown. Later, these split open to reveal rows of yellow and scarlet berried fruits. The orange berries of the evergreen Liberia ixoides have a fascination that their white flowers did not. And those shamelessly exotic bulbs, the eucomis tribe, develop strange maroon pods. Tidy gardeners who transform the lushness of summer into sad cemetaries of tufted tombstones by cutting all down, will deprive themselves of what could be a winter's wonderland. |
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