How to stop your garden looking like crap every autumn
PLUS: Move over Monty Don, there's a new gentleman gardener I'm obsessed with
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Hi hello! It’s raining at last!!! And the leaves are falling off the trees and the flowers are fading and the clouds are gathering. All feels - at last - right with the world. It’s winter (almost).
Any my garden looks like crap!
In addition to blathering on about gardens in this newsletter, I also write a weekly gardening column in The Sunday Times that highlights new and inspiring gardens around WA. I love it because it gives me an excuse to invite myself around to strangers’ homes and talk plants with people who are just as obsessed as I am (and who invariably send me home with cuttings). It’s great. Except right about now, when it sucks, because nobody bloody well wants to have me over.
“It’s really not looking its best right now… can you come back in spring?” I hear, time and time again, before I manage to strong-arm just enough gardeners into allowing me over so I can make it through the winter season without getting the sack.
And that’s what I want to talk to you about today, because if these seasoned, inspirational gardeners don’t want to show off their gardens in May, June, July or August, is it any wonder that the rest of us spend the winter months feeling like total failures in the garden too?
The grass turns to mud, the spent summer annuals have left pockmarked gaps of bare earth in their wake, most of the plants are refusing to flower, the trees are leafless and everything feels a bit sombre, empty and dull.
Well, today we are going to change that.
I’ve decided I’ve had enough of getting down on my garden every autumn. And I speak to sooo many other gardeners who experience the same rollercoaster of seasonal emotions, so I know I’m not the only one feeling dejected by the time June arrives. Actually, let’s be honest - for Perth gardeners the dejection typically begins with our February heatwaves, rolls on into March accompanied by mass plant deaths, endures through April with extended droughts and settles, like grey dust, over the empty May garden and its flowerless beds.
Not this year.
This year I have a plan, inspired by none other than the grandfather of garden design, Piet Oudolf, whose largely-perennial-filled gardens are like a symphony in every season. And maybe I’m not going to get it quite right first time, but I’ve just ordered an excessive number of perennial grasses from the Diggers Club and gosh darn it I’m gonna try!
So, today I’m going to talk to you about three things we can do in out gardens to stave off the winter doldrums and - hopefully - keep the beauty going all year long:
Adding plants for STRUCTURE
Embracing plant death as a feature - not a bug - of your garden design
Maximising what is flowering though the winter months
If you are a paying subscriber, I’m going to follow this newsletter up with another on Monday that you don’t wanna miss. It contains an excel spreadsheet of all of the plants that flower in my garden across each month of the year, separated into categories like climbers, bulbs, annuals etc.
I’m planning to use it to intentionally work more colour and interest into my own garden in every season, and I thought you might find it useful too. So stay tuned for that. If you’re not yet a paying subscriber and you’d like to receive the spreadsheet to guide you in your planting, you can upgrade your subscription to paid via the button below.
Ok. Let’s start with number 1.
Adding structure to your garden
So let’s start with Piet (pronounced Pete) Oudolf. He’s basically a genius. He plants gardens like a man painting a moving canvas, and even his garden layout drawings (made with what look to me like children’s textas) are strangely beautiful to stare at.
He’s considered by many to be a pioneer in garden design, and his gardens are known for being gorgeous in every season. One way he achieves this is by making sure he grows plants that provide structure. I’ve now watched and read a bunch of interviews with Piet, and here’s what (I think) he’s getting at:
One reason our gardens can fall to pieces in autumn is that we haven’t provided them with strong bones. I often talk about how trees provide the skeleton of a garden, and that’s still true, but trees aren’t enough to hold everything together when the light and fizzy growth of spring and summer has died back. We need more shrubs and perennials. We need structural plants that hold their form throughout the year and continue to provide interest in winter, even if it’s not in the form of flowers.
I walked through my garden thinking about this, and I realised that the areas that are working even in late autumn are those with perennial plants that are still adding shape to the garden. Here are some of the plants that are continuing to do the heavy lifting:
Wormwood (Artemesia)
Salvia (many varieties)
Italian cypress (pencil pine)
Passionfruit marigolds (in flower)
Chinese lantern (in flower)
Elephant grass
Miscanthus grass
Side note: One big feature of Piet’s gardens is the huge presence of perennial grasses. They are great for adding a flowing, ethereal quality to your planting, and because they are perennials, they continue to add mass and structure to the garden even in winter. At this point, I paused in my design contemplations to purchase an inordinate number of grasses online, among them:
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