Common Ground – October 2019

Listen! the wind is rising,

   and the air is wild with leaves,

We have had our summer evenings,

    now for October eves.

Humbert Wolfe

 

Indian summer has arrived here in the valley. We haven’t had any frost yet. The warm days and a few good rains have given the annuals a second go around.

Late planted nasturtiums beside the door look glorious along with night scented stock. It has only taken me about twenty years to get night scented stock to grow close to the house. It self-seeds with abandon in the vegetable garden. But I wanted it to grow where I could enjoy the scent going in and out of the door. And now it seems that the garden gods have finally granted my wish.

Some garden victories take a long time. It is good, I think, that we don’t always get what we want right away.

On the other side of the door I have always had a patch of Jewellweed. No idea how it came to be there. It planted itself many years ago. It’s really too dry for Jewellweed there and I usually end up watering it all summer. The orange flowers (think mini impatiens) are pretty as is the pale green foliage.

The self-seeded California poppies are still going strong in the vegetable garden. These will take quite a lot of frost before giving up for the season. I have even seen a few survive the winter. And since they seed themselves mainly on the paths between vegetable beds, they really don’t interfere with getting beds cleaned up and ready for spring.

I just sort of drifted into organising the vegetable garden in rectangular beds with paths in between. After much trial and error, I have ended up with mostly four foot wide beds of varying length. They only get walked on twice a year; once for planting in the spring and once in the fall for cleanup.

It turns out that this system allows the soil to stay loose and uncompacted. I have used maple leaves for mulch for many years. If there are any leaves left in the fall I loosely turn them into the soil with a fork. No tilling necessary.

I find the rectangular beds a much more efficient use of space than long rows spaced far apart. Growing in rows rather than the patches of classic cottage gardens dates back to the invention of the horse drawn seed drill. This was a good invention for farmers needless to say. But for small scale home gardeners it means more work and I’m on the side of smaller plots and less work.

Other annuals still going strong at this time of year are rocket snapdragons and a funny little munchkin hollyhock that I grew from seed. It’s barely three feet high and has showy double pink flowers. I am over the idea that double hollyhocks look like toilet paper flowers. I think it was Patrick Lima who put that unfortunate idea out there.

I might also be over my dislike of ornamental grasses. A lot of them are very invasive if you’re not careful. I recently saw a photo in a glossy English gardening magazine of a beautiful planting of nothing but grasses. There was a weathered grey wooden deck with equally weathered chairs and a table in the middle of a sea of grasses. I just wanted to sit down there and make myself comfortable.

Not sure if I will ever get around to planting any grasses. But tastes need to keep evolving and changing and our gardens need to constantly be reinvented.

With that idea in mind I will be adding to my bed of giant alliums this fall. I started this bed just a few years ago for no other reason than these big purple puffball plants look slightly ridiculous. They’re fun and a good reminder to not take ourselves too seriously.

Fall is, of course, the real new year. Not a lot of reinvention can be done in the garden in January when everything is frozen solid. So let’s get on with it and enjoy these beautiful fall days.

By Jill Williams

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