10 November 2016

Yesterday we spent the morning tidying away the plants that were killed by the previous night’s frost – the blackened dahlias in the bottom two beds, the deep red Cosmos that had been flowering in several of the beds right up till then, and the runner beans planted and harvested by the children from Mentmore  Road Under Fives Preschool. It all looks a bit emptier now! We’d already weeded the new lavender edging and tidied the edges of the beds, so the only thing left to do was to dead-head any plants we think will carry on for a bit longer, and stake some of the verbena bonariensis and linaria that were flopping over. We’ll need to mulch the dahlia tubers with leaf mould to protect them from any sharper frosts, but we want to wait until after Sunday as the leaf mould isn’t completely rotted and it’ll look untidy for a while at first.

It’s a difficult balance to get right. If we strip out everything except the shrubs and perennials, the garden may look more tightly managed on Sunday, but we’d lose a lot of the early flowers like deadnettles and forget-me-nots that make a large contribution to the nectar and pollen needed by bees emerging in the spring (or whenever it’s warm enough right through the winter). If we cut down all the dead stems and seed heads, we remove shelter for predatory insects over the winter, particularly ladybirds – and they did a great job this year in cleaning any aphids off the roses, for example. Many of the seed heads look great in frosty weather, too, adding to the interest in the gardens when most of the plants are dormant. We’ve also left a lot of seedlings which we’ll edit down to a few plants later on, when they’re bigger; I hope they don’t look as if we just haven’t weeded the beds!