Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why you clear up autumn leaves?
Plus: RHS Chelsea Flower Show news and November garden jobs
November jobs in the garden
Making leaf mould: or leaving the leaves on your borders as I’ve always done, admittedly partly out of laziness but also out of an inability to understand how fallen leaves don’t affect the countryside around our tended gardens, and so why should I then need to clear them from the soil in my flowerbeds? These leaves cover and then degrade. Plants grow from beneath. The cycle continues.
I hope your garden is ok if you’ve been affected by recent storms wherever in the world you find yourself
I’d been wondering whether recent storms seemed more memorable purely due to the fact that in the UK they’d only relatively recently been given names, but Storm Ciaran has put that query firmly to rest. Europe received a battering at the end of this week, and there are a lot of leaves on the ground. We’ll be looking at what to do with them (or not, as the case may be) in today’s post, along with a couple of other garden jobs as well as the things I’m avoiding. There’s also a gift offer if you’re thinking that membership of The Gardening Mind might be a good idea for someone you know.
Before we get to that, though, I wanted to highlight that there’s some brand new super-exciting news in the Access all Areas at RHS Chelsea Flower Show section
Many of the gardens for next year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show were announced this week, and you can find out about the proposed Show gardens here. There are some real treats in store for 2024, with gardens for every taste and style.
Over the next few months leading up to the show, I’ll also be taking a look back at the very first gardens I ever designed for RHS Chelsea, back in 2009 and 2010. I’ll be looking at the process and my experiences, from the application at the very beginning, right through to the build and the week of the show itself. I’ll be digging out drawings from my archives1 as well as talking with designers who have previously exhibited at the show.
Next week, I’ll also be taking a look at the smaller, but equally-interesting Sanctuary gardens, which you’ll be able to find in the same section
You may be wondering why you haven’t received an email alert about these new Flower Show posts: in order to keep down the number of emails in your inbox, I’ll be posting most of the news straight to this Access All Areas section, so if you’re interested in the latest RHS flower show news, do check in on it every now and then. Remember that the Sections don’t show up on the phone app, so this is something to browse through on a laptop or desktop, where you can see all the sections along the top of the page:
In the meantime, here’s some news about another garden that looks like a LOT of fun at next year’s show. It won’t be a judged garden, so I’m able to single it out here for you. Harry Holding is definitely on my ‘One to Watch’ list, so how thrilled was I when I saw that the RHS have partnered up with him for a garden at RHS Chelsea 2024:
Well, what a stormy few days. What’s the weather like where you are right now?
Are you able to get out into your garden, or is it water-logged? And if you can get out there, what are you up to in the garden this week?
I for one, will not be raking up leaves:
It’s certainly been windy all over Northern Europe, and I have huge drifts of leaves all over the place, as, in the face of the storm, the copper beech which looms over my garden decided not to put up a battle and instead dropped all its leaves in a gusty flash. I know some will be getting their rakes out, but I’ll be leaving these leaves on my borders, as I’ve pretty much always done. This is partly out of laziness, I admit. But this habit stems out of an inability to understand how fallen leaves don’t affect the countryside around our tended gardens, and so why should I then need to clear them from the soil in my flowerbeds? These leaves cover and then degrade. Plants grow from beneath. The cycle continues.2 If you’ve been part of The Gardening Mind for a while, you may recall this debate we had about autumn leaves:
The idea of sweeping up leaves must mainly stem from an idea of tidiness, and maybe hygiene and ‘letting your soil breathe’ whatever that means. But, and I admit this is mainly out of a slight idleness, I’ve never cleared my leaves from beds, apart from where I brush them aside to plant bulbs in November through to February. But even then, I sometimes scrabble the leaves back over where I’ve dug, in a super-casual way, as part one of my five-layered squirrel defence. However clever your resident squirrel may be, to him or her, newly-disturbed ground represents a massive clue, and so it logically follows that the less disturbed the soil looks, the bigger the chance that the squirrel won’t head for it the second you walk away. It’s not completely foolproof, I hasten to underline, but it’s just one of the many layers I employ to outwit these pesky little things. (Or not