Natural Selection

A Year in the Garden

Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Contents

January

J

Because the first month of the year is the darkest, you might think it is the most inert in the garden, but January is not a month in which everything drops back into inactivity. Our benign climate means that there is always something pushing against the season to draw us out into the garden as witnesses. The foliage of celandine against bare earth, the perfume of witch hazel: each holds your attention and ostensibly has the floor to itself; but look again and the garden is full of intrigue. Low, raking light catches seedheads from a season spent, and plant skeletons provide a spectacular framework for frost if you let them stand, as I do, in the belief that it is good to see the garden run the full course of its cycle.

I love our four seasons, and winter is never one to fear, for it is then that there is room to think. The frenzy of activity that comes with the growing season is absent and you can look up and around and take in your surroundings without the burning feeling of the yard-long list of tasks. You can see a tree's structure and history in its naked branches, just as you can see the plants that are ready for winter pruning.

Pace yourself with the winter work and use this time to plan for building in change, to keep a garden feeling vital and refreshed. Tasks map the season, but although we have several weeks ahead of us to revitalise and re-do, there is time in January to embrace the winter garden.

1 January, Hillside

FIELDS OF DREAMS

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Above ground and in the cold and the low light of January, the garden is at its quietest moment. The rust-coloured, velvety buds are yet to break on the hamamelis, and though the catkins are formed on the hazel they are clutched tight and sensibly waiting. Even the snowdrops are showing little above the ground, and for the first time in ages I feel I have the time to think.

I can see now what my neighbour meant when she said that she looks forward to the slower pace of winter, for the growing season was frenetic: the rush of sap and weight of growth never abating once the tide had turned in the spring. Hunger and exhaustion finally drove me in with the revelation that I had sometimes gone a whole day without ever stopping to look at my surroundings.

I can afford that luxury now that the weeds are in stasis, turning my back on the kitchen garden for a little and starting my day down by the stream, walking the length of it where it slips along the boundary. From here I can look up to the slopes where the garden will one day be and amble through what we have achieved in the first year here. I lost only two of the 400 hedge plants and saplings that went in last winter – and I'm asking myself if it was the beneficial mycorrhizal fungi in the Rootgrow that were added while planting that got them through the drought in spring.

The newly planted fruit trees also recovered after they were stripped of foliage by the sheep. Their willingness to return suggests they already had a well-developed root system. I also experimented this year with not incorporating muck or compost into the planting holes of the trees and shrubs. Current thinking goes that as long as your soil is in good condition, it is better not to give the plants a false head start, as over-nurtured plants can refuse to move beyond the 'comfort' of the planting hole. I stand by the importance of improving your soil if it is poorly drained or impoverished, but I am simply adding the Rootgrow for now.

I could see the blaze of Californian poppy (Eschscholzia) in the meadows from the other side of the valley in June and I completely fell in love with the Linum grandiflorum 'Rubrum'. The red flax danced on its wire-thin stems, each flower rimmed with a darker eyeliner at the edge of the petal. I'm wondering how the self-sown mix will do this year, as the seedlings of the Eschscholzia have already found their way into the cracks of the yard, softening the concrete of the farmer's footprint.

I will oversow with seed saved from the flax and start some experimental mixes with umbellifers such as the delightfully lacy Orlaya grandiflora. They will be teamed with Shirley poppies, creamy corncockle 'Ocean Pearl' and the giant dandelion clocks of Tragopogon to mark a new palette for the upcoming year.

Stretching ahead of us is the planting season, and what could be more appropriate for a new year than planting trees? I have ordered Malus to make a huddle of crabs on the slopes behind us to complement the blossom wood. Malus transitoria has filigree leaves and tiny golden fruits and has a wild look about it, while M. hupehensis, the tea crab from China, is a more ornamental thing and can come closer to the house. This Chinese species is arguably one of the best crab apples, forming an upright tree in its youth to spread out comfortably in middle age. The flowers are deliciously scented, the branches laden with dark red fruits.

It is a good time for pondering the exact positions for your new plantings to ensure they have room to make their journey to maturity. I find myself planting more than I need so that they can protect each other in youth, but I will have to be a disciplinarian later and thin them to prevent them from spoiling each other. These are dilemmas I am allowed to ponder for now, but it won't be long before the snowdrops are giving us the nod that the resting period is over.

7 January, Peckham

LEAVE AND LET LIVE

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After the past couple of weeks of inertia, the temptation to sweep out the detritus of the old year to welcome in the new is considerable. I want to be out there building a bonfire or clearing a patch of rough ground to greet the new year, but it is so worthwhile taking time to think about what really needs to be done. Our instinct to tidy should be curbed. More and more I find myself urging people not to clear a garden too rigorously or too early because, however small, these plots of land are oases to a slumbering ecology. Gardens are stripped, made up, and turned down like hospital beds far too frequently, and homes to hedgehogs, ladybirds, slug-eating ground beetles and lacewings are swept aside in the process. So much beauty can be lost in a clear-up and so little gained for things looking spruce and pukka.

I am not advocating leaving everything in a shambles, but a gentle transition to neatness and readiness for the spring is a much better option than blitzing it all now. To appreciate this you need to take time to tune in to the subtleties of winter looking is just as important as the acting on it. The ghosts of the last season may be a shadow of their former selves but, when you take a closer look, they are as beautiful in a different way.

The rhythms of decay have their own pace, and a good reason for taking the time they do. Next time you are out there, crouch down to see how the fallen leaf litter is being pulled back into the ground by earthworms. The first time I saw this, I couldn't work out why all the leaves were pointing up from the ground with one end pulled in, but leaves are food for the worms, and the bacteria and the decomposed leaves provide much needed humus for the soil. Then turn your eye to what the last season has left behind as skeletons. Like miniature cities reaching skyward, many are home to insects and a host of other living things, and as structures they are often one of the most beautiful aspects of the winter garden.

Look to the hedgerows, roadside embankments and waste ground and it is easy to argue that this is their best season, with the colour pared back now that the greens have receded. I love green, but in the winter months you realise that the predominance of green often prevents you from registering the detail – and the winter skeletons are all about detail. Bleached grasses strike their pale vertical lines into the landscape like a mirage when you see them en masse. Some spent stems crisscross as they weaken at the base to break with the upright, but it all has its charm with tangles of vetch hanging in blackened nests and dots of chocolate brown marking the presence of long-gone moon daisies. High above the grasses are the last of the umbels – wild carrot, hemlock and sweet cicely, with its sooty seeds hanging in pale cages.

Despite appearances, winter is also far from monochrome, and the range of browns, buffs, cinnamons and oranges seem infinite in their informal weave. The rusts heat up when it is wet, and the blacks darken so that teasel is as dark as coal in a smouldering grassland. When it is dry, the parchment tones of the grasses whiten and bleach to silver on a rare bright day. That's one good reason for leaving some rough ground if you have the room, and certainly a rich inspiration for what you can bring together for winter interest in the garden.

When planning perennial planting, I always choose a good percentage for their ability to leave behind something of note for this season. Some, such as tradescantia and many of the geraniums, wither back to nothing, their foliage dragged to earth by the worms to leave only the expectant crown. But many leave behind the woody structure they formed in the summer, devoid of foliage perhaps and transformed into something quite new and magical. These forms are just as interesting as the summer garden if you play with them in this so-called 'down time'. They provide a framework on which frost and snow (if we have it) can alight, and on which sunlight can be caught where it might otherwise fall to ground without interruption. Many of the spent stems are also rich with seeds. If these are left standing, you might find your garden a-flurry, with blue tits feasting on the fennel seeds or picking over the russety heads of the Phlomis russeliana.

Each skeleton has its own level of endurance – fennel and many of the grasses persist until they start to look out of place among the March newness, so I edit them back only when they lose their will and succumb to inevitable decomposition. The silvery stems of Perovskia also go right through, being reduced only by the need to give them a hard prune in March, but some are as fragile as they look and will last just long enough to be worth it. The eryngiums in my garden are a good example. The tall stems of E. agavifolium make a valiant start, with their cinnamon stems held high above the remnants of their neighbours, but they have all toppled by January and lower the tone of the bolt upright miscanthus nearby. Their cousins, E. giganteum (aptly named 'Miss Willmott's Ghost'), have a little more endurance, but it will not be long now before their silver crowns go from net to nothing. The reference to the ghost in this case has nothing to do with their skeletal forms, but to the charming story that Ellen Willmott, a nineteenth-century gardener, used to scatter the seed surreptitiously in other people's gardens as she was shown around, for it to appear magically the following year. I leave mine until they topple and only remove them to the compost heap at the last moment.

It is easier to be casual in a larger space, but many of the best skeletons take up little room and stand bolt upright. Calamagrostis 'Karl Foerster' is a classic example of a grass that endures almost everything that a winter can throw at it, and during that time it will be the best armature for frost and the wick for low slanting winter light that blazes on its stems. The Miscanthus are also hard to rival, continuing to rustle in the wind and bleach to a variety of natural colours that range from bone whites through to spicy browns. Those that hold their plumage, such as M. sinensis 'Silberspinne', are bright enough on a sunny day to erase any melancholy in an instant.

The sedums form a low-level horizontal plain of rusty seed-heads. I like them more in the winter time without the colour of flower. As plants get older and more lax their tendency to open out in the centre to form a cartwheel is revealed in all nakedness, with the fat buds for next year waiting in the centre. In a group this is amazing to look at, and it always reminds me of coral in a reef or Catherine wheels spinning. Good old-fashioned Sedum 'Autumn Joy' (aka 'Herbstfreude') stands at about 30 cm, while the much larger-growing 'Matrona' often forms a wheel as much as a metre across. You need to wade in at the end of March to remove the remnants, as they keep going if you let them, but by that time they are tinder dry and light as a feather, snapping easily from the rosette. I often scatter opium poppies as a complement and their pods teeter on leafless stems high above the sedums, and in snow each has a hat of white.

Clearing can be hard to resist, but the longer you leave it the more of a chance there will be for anything that can rot to make its way back into the ground to improve it in the coming growing season. Some plants, such as angelica, just can't keep it together for the duration and are quickly toppled by winter rot and wind. When the stems totter, you should resist the urge to have that winter-warming bonfire and give any interlopers a chance to see the winter out in comfort. Break the hollow stems and you will often find little colonies of ladybirds still sleeping there. Best to find a rough corner for these, or at least give them a chance on the compost heap. In spring you will thank them for their efforts to eradicate the first wave of aphids, but in the meantime, you can have the pleasure of knowing you are providing their winter quarters.

8 January, Peckham

GHOST TREES

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Look up and you will see one of the best things this coming season has to offer in the bare branches. Every tree has its own character – the beech slender and steely; the oak twisting and gnarled, its growth showing exactly how long it has taken to attain stature. Distinct among any group or thicket is the birch. On elderly Betula pendula – though elderly may be not much more than fifty or sixty years, as they are fast-growing trees – the branches will hang gracefully to catch the wind. An old tree, now black and white where the bark has cracked dark as charcoal, will show its age in the trunk, but the finely spun limbs will always retain the grace of their youth.

The birch is a pioneer among trees, the scaly wafer-thin seed being light enough to blow from the branches for quite some distance. Happiest on acid soils but content in most, they will often be one of the first trees to grow in newly disturbed ground.

You might think this was the behaviour of a weedy species, and I have pulled a few in my time, but birch is a tree that it is easy to welcome. In three years from seed they will be slender whips, but in seven their russet-coloured bark will be showing white and the branches reaching high enough to cast you a dapple of shade to stand in.

Being pioneers, our native birch suit their own company and the nicest plantings of Betula pendula are en masse, so you can enjoy the repeat of their chalky stems. The groves planted not so long ago between Tate Modern and the Thames are even beginning to cope with the scale of the building behind them as they mature. Birch is not a tree I'd use if gravity were needed, but their veil of twiggery is one of the nicest ways of concealing something you might not want to see without blocking it entirely. This is why they are good for fraying edges and for stopping a boundary from feeling final.

The heightened ornamental quality of the species from China and the Himalayas makes them fine stand-alone trees. Betula utilis var. jacquemontii is perhaps the whitest of them all. It lacks the delicacy of our native B. pendula, but packs a punch in the right place. There are several forms that are as good, and of them 'Silver Shadow' is one of the best.

Betula ermanii is unusual among the group for bark that is touched with salmon pink. The pink-and-red-coloured forms of Betula albosinensis are more colourful still, and 'Kenneth Ashburner' or var. septentrionalis have bark that peels away like paper as the stem stretches from season to season to reveal new colour underneath.

The latter are smaller in stature as trees and useful for a smaller garden, as is the much-underrated Betula nigra. The river birch is a tree for wet places, the pale bark flaking as it ages until it is frilled and feathering the trunks. Team it with fiery-coloured Salix for the winter and you will find the dark months are something you positively look forward to.

10 January, Peckham

NEW YEAR'S HONOURS

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A new year stretches ahead of us and already I am ring-marking space so that things I failed to do last year don't slip through my fingers again. I want to visit the Atlas Mountains to be part of an early spring and to witness the plants I love most growing in the wild and in context. There are garden moments too, the erythroniums at Knightshayes and the magnolias at Caerhays in Cornwall. Of course this is a distraction from the cold muddy beds and the plants that are in retreat here in my wintry garden, but it is good to have plans.