What to do and what not to do in your garden in November. Plus: gardening in your nightie

Do you or don't you?

Whilst I won’t be raking up too many leaves, there are some jobs which I definitely will be tackling

Also, do you garden in your nightie/ PJs?

A portal into Autumn

First of all, a reminder:

It’s Week 2 of the Small Garden Design Course, and this will be out tomorrow, Wednesday 30th. You can find Week 1 here. Remember, if you don’t want to get emails from certain sections, you can select your preferences in your Settings. (While we’re on it, I’ve chosen not to receive any emails for any of the accounts I subscribe to - I treat Substack as a kind of newspaper and just open it up each morning and scroll through the latest articles from those I subscribe to, which appear in a banner).

You can start this course at any time, so come and join in. Prices are going to go up significantly next month, so if you’ve been thinking about joining for a while and want to fix your forever subscription rate at just over £1 a week, you can do so here:

I would say that autumn is well and truly here - what do you think? That feeling of alternately crunchy/soft leaves underfoot, and the sheer bliss of catching the right moment to be under a tree just as it decides to rain leaves on you:

Whilst we’re on autumn colours, can we just give a quick shout-out to those shrubs and trees, those underpinnings which like good underwear, holdeverything together?

In my own little cottage garden, you can see just what a brilliant job they do. Five different trees and shrubs here, in layers, have created a garden where before there was nothing apart from some odd' ‘privacy panels’ which were actually doing the opposite of providing privacy, and instead drawing attention to themselves and what lies beyond by dint of their weirdness.

Before the shrubs arrived, and the afterwards effect in autumn

You don’t really see the shrubs in the summer, not properly, but in autumn, as the flowers beneath them fade, my goodness they come into their own. If you’re thinking you’d like to know more about how to work with shrubs, these forgotten beauties, you can find out more in the Border design series here:

How to choose plants for your flowerbeds and borders

and here:

Designing shrub borders

As ever, I promise you that it’s easy.

• November is bare-root rose planting time - hurrah! My absolute favourite planting task, I cannot wait for the roses I’ve chosen to arrive, and to get them heeled in/planted, with all the promise of colour that this job brings with it.

  You can read about how to do this here. There are a couple of key things to remember - make sure the planting hole is a good size. It needs to be deep enough for the long roots, and probably twice as wide as the span of these roots, so that you’ve got room for some good compost in there too. Do remember if you can to sprinkle some mycorrhizal fungi over the roots before you place the rose in its hole - I have no idea whether these beneficial fungi actually work but in my experience the roses are always very happy, and they always have had a slosh of this powdery stuff.

• As you can see, my own garden has pretty much all the structure it needs for the moment, but in clients’ gardens I’m planting bare-root trees and shrubs. November is the ideal time for bare-root planting, as with roses above, as plants are dormant and therefore remain happy when lifted from their nursery beds and planted in their forever homes. It’s a much cheaper way to plant too.

• Finally, the tulip bulbs can go in. I’m planting most of mine in pots, to avoid disease. More on that, and the Bulb Cheat Sheet, here:

  Tulip bulbs and the big squirrel question

  There are loads of brilliant tulip sales on at the moment: J Parkers and Farmer Gracy have discounts, and if you don’t feel like creating your own collection, Sarah Raven’s ready mixes are also on offer.

• I’ll be cutting back the straggliest of the perennials, and I may have to harden my heart to cut back the untidy Erigeron karvinskianus which is still flowering but which will perform all the better if it has a good haircut now.

  

  Erigeron sprinkling through the borders

  Do you have this dilemma? It truly is a dilemma for me as it is looking so good, but by the end of the month, I know it’ll be time.

• I’ll then give everything a good mulch, using home-made compost and some that I’m buying in. On that subject, we have a leaf mould discussion coming up soon, thanks to our fellow Gardening Mind Julia - in the meantime, we’d love to hear what you do:

Don’t tidy up the leaves from your beds

There’s more about why I don’t do this here. The autumn colours of trees and hedges are brilliant at the moment, and the photos above show my hornbeam hedge turning a satisfactory shade of yellow-brown: what happens next is that the leaves will fall: onto the beds (leave the leaves), onto the grass and paths (don’t leave the leaves).

I’m going to be avoiding walking on the lawn wherever I can

I’ll just destroy the grass as the grass gets soggier, so I’ll be skirting round the edges where I can, and using ‘picking paths’ to get through flowerbeds.

A narrow path like this isn’t a path you’d use on a regular basis to wander down the garden, but it’s incredibly useful snaking through or along a wide flowerbed. It means you avoid the ground, obviously, but it also means you avoid trampling plants and grass. You can achieve the same sort of thing within a planting bed by using some small - just big enough to tiptoe over- broken slabs of stone. Mini stepping-stones, really.

A picking path

Don’t cut down your dahlias just yet

Unless you need the pots for bulbs of course, but the dahlias are flowering like crazy and are loving the temperatures and the rain. They may collapse under some of the heavier downpours, so a few well-placed sticks and twigs here and there wouldn’t go astray.

Don’t write off being outside

Psychologically we’re well into autumn, so don’t forget to get out and enjoy those daylight hours while you can. I do this in the easiest of ways - if it’s dry and warm, as soon as it’s light I’ll take that first half-pint of tea outside. I’ll be wearing a big snuggly fleecy top from John Lewis pulled over pyjamas, (I buy my children these tops each year for Christmas, and then each year swiftly and silently appropriate them as necessary):

I’ve got a really bad habit of just being too impatient to get outside in the morning whilst not being properly kitted out: I’m trying to train myself not to go outdoors in slippers first thing, as they always get absolutely soaked and anyway, slippers are made for indoors. My favourites used to be these Poddy and Black easy garden shoes with woollen insoles which were a game changer here for early morning bare feet:

Poddy and Black ankle boots - alas, no more!

These have now eventually collapsed after five years of heavy duty action, so I went to order some more, but I’ve seen that they’re no longer in business… disaster! But in the hunt for the elusive perfect garden ankle boot, load of ads are now being thrown at me and I’ve seen a lot for Merry People. Friends tell me this make is great, with a comfortable ankle boot which can also be worn round and about, not just in the garden - do you have any experience of these? Or any other recommendations?

Merry People

Whilst we’re on recommendations, my favourite pyjama supplier Oysho has stopped making pyjamas - the tragedy, especially as they’re now concentrating on ‘athleisurewear’ which is way less fun (though they do have excellent raincoats). Their PJs were reasonable priced, kind of traditional in style, and in every fabric from the lightest of cotton for summer and proper flannel/ brushed cotton which were perfect for autumn and winter garden forays. I’m talking blue and white stripes, checked - that kind of thing. But can I find any that aren’t £100s? I’ve found these from Nobody’s Child, but they’re twice the price I’d like to pay:

Nobody’s Child

Let me know if you have any recommendations:

This get-up will never get me in the fashion pages or a ‘what the hortirati are wearing in the garden’ article, but do I care? No. Can the neighbours see me? Yes. Will this affect the rest of my day? No.

For a conversation on what to wear outside when it does eventually get chillier, you might like the chat we had back in January.

This next one is neither a do or a dont; it’s more of a ‘What do you do?’

As unedited as ever, this is what’s currently flowering in my garden.

At the moment out in my garden I have in flower dahlias, begonias (yes really), roses, verbena, amaranthus, leycesteria, hesperantha - which used to be shizostylis which was far more dangerous to pronounce - gladioli, calendula, gaura and nasturtiums. I so want to pick them and bring them in to enjoy them. Although as you know I do find it hard to bring myself to cut flowers from the garden, normally at this time of year, I’d see these flowers more if they were inside and so do steel myself and do the deed before the hammering rain does the job for me. But while I’m still outside a bit more than usual? While these flowers still look just so happy and the colours are just so cheer-bringing? While those big lumbering bumblebees are still making the most of them? I think I’ll wait a little longer.

There’s so much I need to hear from you about:

Best early morning gardening kit?

What do you do about cutting flowers?

What are you doing/not doing in your garden this week?

Anything else?

THANK YOU FOR THE ❤️, by the way! It gives this post a shot of adrenaline and sends it whizzing to people who wouldn’t otherwise see it - so thank you for liking it.