Garden Notes

Now is a good time to assess your borders and decide what to move and what needs dividing. It has been an odd year. I have had dahlias that did not flower till September and tall pink cosmos that took to the middle of September to flower though the white flowered much earlier.

If you follow Bob Brown’s (Cotswold Garden Flowers) advice you will move plants when they are not involved in sex. His idea is that plants that are flowering and making seeds are not also putting out new roots. This makes sense. They always tell you to split grasses in spring and we know that they flower and seed in late summer.

Plants that flower early such as primroses, hellebores, poppies, pulmonarias, dicentra and delphinium should all be split in the Autumn. While asters, phlox, heleniums, crocosmias, and red hot pokers can be split in the spring. I would put any that flower up to the end of June in the first group. This can be awkward if you want to redo a border, so I shall dig the whole clump of late flowerers up and put them in the veg patch to divide in spring and divide the spring flowers and also put them in the veg patch. I have several borders that could do with this. Especially one that is over run with a once flowering alstroemeria. Beautiful, but it leaves a huge gap.

If you have conifers it is useful to run a string round them ,hidden inside of course, to prevent them splaying out if we have any snow. Who knows what this winter will bring.

We visited East Lambrook Manor, the Margery Fish garden, and were very pleased to see it in such good condition. Lots of interesting plants and a good nursery. Sadly the cafe only served cake.