I don’t know about you but I’m feeling rather underwhelmed with my September garden this year. It looks tired and a bit lack lustre. As if it’s running out of steam. Is that just me or are you feeling that way too about your garden?
Part of my problem is that I’ve recently been away on holiday for a few days – and it’s been so hot too! Two things guaranteed to knock the stuffing out of my poor garden and make it look neglected. So this weekend I’m concentrating on giving it a bit of a refresh and tidy. Here are the things I’m doing to perk it up.
Rose Deadheading
It’s amazing what extra life you can eek out of plants if you routinely deadhead. This is particularly true with roses. So I’m going to re-double my efforts. I’m pretty good at deadheading them. I find it very therapeutic wandering around the garden in the early evening, sometimes with a gin and tonic in one hand, and my secateurs in the other. As a result I rarely have an entire rose covered in old flower heads. But it’s easy to miss a few days and suddenly find everything is looking a bit sad!
And I’ve been away for a few days. Those old fading flowerheads have been allowed to accumulate.
Rose Feeding
At the same time I’m going to give my roses a further spray of Uncle Tom’s rose tonic. I’ve been doing this every two weeks to try to combat the terrible black spot which seems to blight my roses this year. I think it is at last paying dividends. They look a lot perkier – though still the black spot is pretty terrible.
If you’re new to Uncle Tom’s – I was until my neighbour Desi introduced me to it – let me fill you in. It acts as a tonic/rose feed to promote new strong and healthy growth. Uncle Tom’s is natural. So it is perfect for gardeners like me who don’t like to use chemicals in the garden, and also this makes it really bee, insect and butterfly friendly.
The recommendation is to use the tonic every 7-14 days when things are growing strong (April to October). Starting early like this prevents disease problems and encourages healthy growth from the beginning of the season. The idea being it is easier to prevent than cure a problem.
Sadly though, I have a significant black spot problem with my roses. But I’m hopeful in a year or two all this attention and feeding will have made my roses so superhuman that they fight off the pesky black spot. Well that’s the idea. As my plants do have so much black spot I’m also drenching the soil around my roses periodically to give them some extra support. Who knows if that’s going to work but I think it’s worth a try.
Nepeta
I’m similarly giving my nepeta a reboot. Its flowerheads are very tired and fading. When in full bloom they look lovely tumbling onto my patio from the sunny border. But when the blooms are past their best the whole plant looks rather dusty. The effect is really scruffy. So I’m not going to mess around. I’m cutting back the dry bits to give the plant some shape and encourage a further surge of growth for my September garden.
Sayonara Sweet Peas
Mr F-W and I have just returned from a lovely mini break in West Wales. It’s one of our favourite places in the world. We honeymooned there almost 31 years ago! Where we stayed this time was a wonderful tiny cottage – well not even a cottage, more a tiny converted barn, in the middle of nowhere but 10 minutes from the sea. Bliss.
Anyway, the reason for this seemingly meandering digression is our lovely landlady, Fran, in her neighbouring cottage had the most fantastic display of sweet peas. They looked fresh, beautiful straight stems, gorgeous colours. Everything about them was picture perfect. So it made it all the more annoying to return home to my pathetic display of sweet peas. Tired, yellowing leaves…awful. They look an absolute shambles and they’re dragging everything else down. So I’ve already binned them. I stuck them straight in the green recycling bin as I’ve no room on my compost heap for them. (Sorting out my compost heap is one of my big autumn gardening jobs!). The patio already looks so much fresher thanks to them being removed.
Box
I have a few Buxus box balls in my semi shaded bed. They provide a bit of structure and interest in the unruly border once things like the alliums, sweet woodruff and silene fimbriata have finished blooming. The balls just about stop the border tipping over from loose and wild into absolute shambles!
I also have Box hedging in front of one of our scruffy sheds. It’s meant to add a little interest to what’s otherwise an absolute garden eyesore. Who knows what will happen to this hedging when the shed is removed (Mr F-W is still suggesting this could be by end of March – hurrah!)
But in the meantime, the hedging and balls need a tidy up. The experts suggest pruning Box (Buxus) in late May or early June after all risk of frost has passed. It can then be further tidied up in September. That way it has a lovely crisp look over winter. Giving my otherwise wild garden a bit of structure and even, dare I hope, panache.
The trick with box is to choose a dry but cloudy day to trim it.
Now I’m absolutely rubbish at judging things by eye. So the chance of me trimming my box hedge into elegant straight lines is zero.
Monty Don of Gardener’s World fame, puts up a set of string guides to follow when pruning Box. But I’m not likely to do that very accurately or patiently each and every year! Thankfully, Mr F-W has created for me a clever frame thing.
It ingeniously mirrors the size of hedge I want to have. I then simply put this over the top of the Box hedge. I then use sharp shears to trim anything that’s protruding outside the frame. Anyway, I’m going to whip out the old frame and sort the hedging out.
With the Box balls I don’t have anything to guide me. So they’re more of a risk.
But I’ve done some – going gently – and they’re not too bad. I feel, even if my final shape isn’t a perfect sphere, their sharpened contours give my September garden a much fresher look.
Mowing and Edging
Rather like hoovering your carpets always makes a room look tidier, mowing the grass undoubtedly will make my September garden look much more loved. Mowing it also disguises the fact that, as my no mow May experience proved, my lawn is 90% anything other than grass! I don’t care at all.
I’m not at all fussed about having or maintaining manicured grass. When it’s cut, the expanse looks pretty good and it shows off the flowerbeds which is my main aim. But to give it an even more tended look to rescue my September garden, I’m going to edge the borders too.
Edging makes a tremendous difference. A bit like the Box trimming, edging the lawn just makes everything look as though it has been tended to.
Indeed a bit like when you are selling a house the estate agents recommend having the smell of freshly brewed coffee and just-baked bread to give the feel of a ‘lovely house.’ I think deadheading, lawn mowing and edging, plus a container or two generously full of gorgeous, overflowing blooms give a garden the illusion that it’s lovely – even when that’s often far from the truth!
Anyway, back to the lawn edging bit of this. We have a really good half-moon shaped tool for edging our lawn. I think Mr F-W bought it on eBay. That said, a spade works pretty well.
Help Out the Hostas
I’ve oodles of hostas in the garden – both in my borders and in pots.
Hostas are grown for their leaves. But with any plant which has impactful leaves, you want to show them off to their best advantage. But in a September garden, the slugs have had plenty of time to munch them. So many of those showy leaves are in tatters and letting the side down. I’m going to go round the garden checking on them. I’ll remove the worst leaves. It’s incredible how by removing the worst of the leaves a plant can look utterly rejuvenated.
Now an important caveat here. If the plant has nothing but leaves full of holes I’m obviously not going to remove all its leaves. After all, shredded as they are they are still feeding the plant. So if a hosta is nothing but holes, I’ll accept it – that’s sometimes the way after all. And that fat old slug that has feasted on my hosta is probably now feeding one of the birds which I so love to welcome into my garden.
Barrow
I have a gorgeous wheelbarrow which I filled with perennials in May 2022. These include the salvias – Salvia Fashionista Pretty in Pink , Salvia nemorosa Rose Marvel, Salvia Fashionista Vanity Flair plus a Gypsophila Bristol Fairy and Helianthemum Ben Hope. In the height of summer – above – it looks lovely.
Indeed it has looked really lovely for the past two summers. But, although I’ve fed it regularly, I feel the plants in it need a change of scene. They’re looking very tired. I know this sounds daft but I feel they need the chance to ‘stretch their roots’ and grow in some fresh soil. So I’m going to lift the perennials from the barrow, separate them out as best I can and replant them with fresh compost in either one large or a number of smaller containers. I have a lot of containers empty as I lost of lot of plants in the late frost.
The plants from the barrow won’t look instantly fresher but I do think that will help these plants regain their mojo. I may then put them back in the barrow next May. In the meantime, I’m going to plant the wheelbarrow up with some plants for a nice winter display. But that will have to be a future blog!
Those are my tidying jobs for my September garden. Hopefully by this time next week both it and I will have regained our va va voom.
Happy gardening x
I’d guess a lot of fellow gardeners are feeling “underwhelmed” with their gardens come the end of August/beginning of September. I think it is natural, at least in areas which experience all four seasons distinctly. Come this time of year, the tasks of watering containers, weeding beds, deadheading, staking etc. become more tiresome and one is eager for a rest, because one senses rest is coming. I personally am looking forward to the quiet season in the garden, when there’s less to do. Perhaps it’s just my age. I am “only” in my late forties, but already notice that certain garden “chores” are more tiring than they used to be. I take this into account now when making future plans for my garden. Luckily, I can see the beauty in a garden winding down and getting ready to settle for the season and I see no shame in things looking less that their “best”. Here as well, it’s about embracing nature and not fighting it. Everything peaks and then fades but it doesn’t become “less” . The good thing is, I know with certainty that I’ll be running around like a spring chicken come March – full of ideas and fresh energy. But for now, it’s time to accept – and it is okay – that things begin to wither.
Hi Jill I do agree that there’s a natural rhythm to things and that September is certainly a time to accept that a lot of the garden is winding down. I’m certainly one to embrace and not fight nature.
I think the particular disappointment for me this year is possibly because in the earlier months the garden wasn’t quite as good as it would normally be. I think the weather confused many of my plants. So I wanted to make up for that by getting more from my garden now.