The first frosts of autumn 2012.

After a very mild period the warm air has rushed back down to North Africa or wherever it came from, leaving a vacuum to be filled by cold winds from the far north of Europe and Russia. The Mediterranean regions have been experiencing violent storms and rain in unreasonable quantities (“a month’s rain in an hour” and similar phrases are frequently heard on weather reports) confirming the wisdom of our choice of region to settle in. Not for us the extremes of other parts of France. In the meantime the east coast of the United States is being battered by hurricane Sandy.

Autumn colour from Rhus in a garden in Chabris, central France

The first frost last night touched some of the more tender plants and I have been out collecting pots from the garden and putting them under cover, either in the unheated conservatory at the front of the house or in the cabin in the back garden. Here, I have constructed a bench from an old cupboard door laid over a couple of desks, in front of a large, south facing window. Electric heaters should keep plants cosy at around 12°C over winter: ideal from Geraniums, Fuchsias, Salvias, Brugmansia, Abutilon and the like, of which we have plenty.

Our so-called hardy banana has been wrapped up in straw and fleece in an attempt to keep it alive out-of-doors. Time will tell if this was the wisest approach. It is also time to lift the Dahlias and Cannas to get them stored in boxes of leaf mould away from the cold for the season. Dahlias will often overwinter in the ground here – we generally leave Gladioli in the beds too – but I have also lost a few. Perhaps this technique of lifting and overwintering will ensure greater survival rates.

Thompson and Morgan have suggested in a recent newsletter that gardeners should be sowing seeds of perennials now, leaving them to germinate in a cold-frame. I shall have a look to see what packets of seed I might have and give this a go. I have collected Lilium regale seed as I did last year and have it in mind to sow a few ornamental grasses like Purple Millet, but I may have to fight off the birds feeding on the seed-heads! Our old conservatory should serve very well as a cold-frame.

Pyracantha berries sparkling in the clear autumn sun today.

It’s turning into a very good year for Pyracantha this year, with huge crops of berries in a range of bright colours on plants throughout the town. We have just one named hybrid in the garden, which I am patiently training along an ugly concrete boundary fence, but several which have arrived as seedlings thanks to the gardening efforts of wild birds. The photograph is of one of a pair in an abandoned garden in the square close to our house. The other was eaten by a camel when the circus came to town, but is recovering well!. Red, orange and yellow berried forms can all be seen in local gardens and it is often used as a thorny boundary hedge. Mixed berry colour hedges can look particularly attractive but some care has to be exercised when pruning to ensure they produce flowers and berries.

A typical French Autumn

Autumn leaf and flower colour from Rhus and Miscanthus in our garden this morning.

Every day this week has been different to the last. Today it is mild and drizzling on and off, while yesterday it was dry, with just a few clouds passing by. The day before was a most glorious warm, sunny day but it began with a hint of frost. Sunday it poured down while Saturday it kept mostly dry – a bonus for guests who I took to see the grape harvest coming in at local vineyards. In short, a typical autumn week in central France.

In the town, around the market and in the supermarket, all the talk is about mushrooms, or the lack of them. We have been mushroom hunting on our daily walks with the dog and while we bring back a handful most days, there are very few about. The weather is looking encouraging however, after many months without any serious rain, so we are hoping for great things by the end of this or the following week.

Chantal is making her annual autumn jelly from fruit collected on our walks: pears, apples and grapes left behind by the picking machine. To this she has added currents and other soft fruit preserved after picking this summer and a few herbs and spices for luck. We will be bottling soon and look forward to trying it out on friends who regularly offer us examples of their own culinary efforts to try. Last week the Marquis dropped around with a sample of his Two Salmons Rillettes and our lady plumber turned up one evening with freshly hunted venison. Food is important to the people of this community and recipes are commonly argued over in the market place.

Japanese Anemones continue to provide colour

Out in the garden I am pleased to have the ground wetted as I have been waiting to start cultivating the soil for our new lawn. The lawn will be sown as soon as I can so that it will germinate and establish itself before the winter. We are trying to rehabilitate a section of the garden ruined when the swimming pool went in and to link it with an area currently the site of a very poor quality lawn. I can manage about 50 sq.m. a day fighting with the rotavator, after which I need a couple of days of rest – one more push should see the hard work done though. The next task will be the raking off of old grass, weeds and stone, and creating rough levels using new lawn edging secured along the existing beds. The ground will then be trodden down firmly, levelled again to a nice tilth and finally sown with grass seed. A last gentle rake over and we leave it to Nature to work its wonders.

Many of the bedding and herbaceous plants are having a second lease of life in this damp and temperate season: the Begonias have never looked so good, Pot Marigold (Calendula) are in full flower and throughout the garden there are splashes of colour here and there. It looks as if the Salvia Golden Delicious will flower this year: each shoot is carrying a flower bud and one is just starting to show red. We continue to pick tomatoes and our lettuce crop is the best we have had all year.

Summer bedding has never looked so good!

In the park the rain has resulted in a huge rise in the level of the river Cher, but not enough to put off 60 or more swans who took up residence earlier in the week. The gardeners are busily removing summer bedding and replacing it with a mixture of winter and spring flowering plants. I managed to beg a few of last season’s plants from them for our own garden: bedding Dahlias and purple grasses, no longer. I have finished taking cuttings of tender plants for the year but have tried some Holly again, a particularly attractive form which grows by the town campsite.

On Friday I am taking clients to Bourgueil to look at vineyards and taste some wine, while on Saturday or Sunday we’ll all take a trip to the Courson Plant Fair, so it’s a busy week all ’round. We are watching the weather.

Early autumn in the Loire Valley

It seems just yesterday, and is actually not much more than two weeks ago, that I was swimming in the warm waters of the Mediterranean and eating breakfast on the sun-terrace overlooking the harbour on the presqu’île de Giens. Today in the centre of France it is feeling very autumnal: damp and cool, with the sun struggling to burst out of the clouds and a temperature hovering around 20° C. I know; I expect no sympathy from the English!

Grapes ready for the harvest at the vineyard of Chenenceau chateau

Actually I like autumn or, to be more precise, I love the seasonal changes throughout the year and autumn is no exception. In the vineyards of the Touraine it is harvest time and every village you drive through smells of grape juice and wine. I have visited quite a few recently and in spite of a difficult growing year, the excitement and optimism surrounding the “vendage” is palpable. Bernache, the partly fermented not-yet-wine, bubbling, cloudy and yeasty grape juice, is a wonderful seasonal treat here, sold in plastic water bottles – it would explode otherwise. It is drunk immediately it is drawn out of the vat, with roasted chestnuts and much good humour, despite having only 2% alcohol.

Wild Cyclamen carpet the ground in a local garden

There are plenty of summer flowers hanging on although the town has lifted most of its 20,000 bedding plants to prepare the ground for winter and spring flowering plants. I managed to take a few late cuttings before they did so but I do not expect a high rooting percentage at this stage in the season – plants are closing down for the year rather than rooting.

Autumn can be a colourful season, with leaf colour adding to the display both in the towns and the countryside. Under the trees in many gardens and parks the Cyclamen and Colchicum are in full flower.

Autumn is also one of the most important times of the year for planting hardy subjects and I am looking forward to the great buying opportunities at the famous Courson plant fair in a couple of weeks. At the local garden centre I spotted of fine batch of discounted Hydrangea paniculata Sundae Fraise, a compact variety growing to only 1m and with flowers which mature from white to deep pink. I bought a plant to get me in the planting mood.

Back from Provence

Such a long gap in my writing is almost unheard of, but the preparations for our annual  holiday, the holiday itself and all the work awaiting us on our return has kept me very busy indeed.

Salers – one of the most beautiful villages in France

Our journey down took us through the cool mountain scenery of the Auvergne, with a night in one of France’s most beautiful villages, Salers. 16th century buildings in dark volcanic stone sit on a hill overlooking pastures full of the local red cattle breed of the same name. Locating them is easy even in the morning mist, with clanking bells dangling from their necks audible over huge distances. After walking in the mountains and countryside for half a day we headed further south to Murat, and a night at the lake below Gustave Eiffel’s wonderful Viaduct de Garabit, built over the river Truyère in 1885. From their it was a six hour drive to our destination in the sun.

We based ourselves in the Provence this year, for a week or so of exploring the sights of the region around Hyères. We rented an appartment on the presqu‘île de Giens, a paradise for divers, kite surfers and nature lovers, jutting out into the Mediterranean sea near the port of Toulon. I dived a few times with a local club, my first in France and in French.

The land in this region is important horticulturally and nurseries of all kinds fight for space close to tourist villas, salt marshes and vineyards, in an area blessed with a superb climate and high light levels.

Hyères old town

Castel Sainte-Claire

The lovely old town of Hyères contains the villa of the American novelist Edith Wharton, who wintered here annually from 1919 until her death in 1937. Castel Sainte-Claire is open to the public, who are free to wander the terraces of this

very atypical garden, full of tender plants.

I spotted a slection South American plants alongside native species – Lantana in many colours and huge bushes of Erythrina crista-galli. Many Salvia species were in flower but the rare Salvia divinorum formed large, flowerless bushes. Natives includes Santolina, Lavender, Phlomis and a host of plants adapted to the dry climate, often highly scented and covered  in insect life.

Ebooks and the death of the hardback

Our latest article on the Garden Design Academy blog discusses the death of the gardening book. What do you think? Will the ebook soon replace the real thing?

http://gardendesignacademy.blogspot.fr/

Gardening in the real world

Godetia Rembrandt from T&M. One of the bedding plants in flower in the garden today. Many visitors have thought it was an expensive Azalea.

“…sit back, relax and enjoy the fruits of your efforts earlier in the year” This was the advice provided by a gardening book I skimmed through recently, when describing the essential tasks for the month of August. I am not sure where this author gardens, but out here in the real world there is still much to do.

Marigold Golden Puff from Suttons with Antirrhinum Axiom (T&M)

After a poor start, the summer has turned out beautifully, with gorgeous sunny days welcomed by holiday makers but adding to the workload of the gardener. We are growing a fair amount of bedding this year, plenty of vegetables and have recently sowed a new lawn. We have also created a few new planting areas despite not yet having the existing beds up to scratch. All of these demand watering, so every other morning, before the day gets too warm, I start up the pump and provide the plants with the moisture they need. The well is deep and the water pure and rather cool. I have noticed many allotment holders fill up tanks from their wells to allow the temperature to rise a little before applying it to their plants. Of course, watering in the evening might be a better solution, but our life-style does not suit it. The plants might also be happier with watering every day, but that I am not prepared to do.

Lavatera trimestris ‘Twins Hot Pink’ from Thompson & Morgan

Weeding is an endless job here. This is a garden suffering from perhaps twenty years of neglect, so Bindweed smothers the new ornamentals if you turn your back to two minutes and after I have weeded an area it returns almost as strongly within the week. I find Bindweed very handy for tying up tomato plants and climbers but it is a constant battle to keep it down. Weed seedlings are an additional problem, but easier to control provided the job is done regularly. Most of the worst of the nettles and brambles have been dug out and destroyed but it pays to be vigilant. I have to say I quite enjoy weeding – it gets you out amongst the plants and there are always new surprises and delights hiding in the undergrowth! The work is satisfying too: you can look back at what you have achieved in the previous hour and clearly see that progress has been made. I like to flit about, tackling the worst patches or the areas where something attractive is just starting to flower. I flit – but I’m thorough with it, trying to ensure I remove all the weeds while at the same time tidying the ornamentals.

F1 Sunflower The Bees Knees – a dwarf, pollen-free mix which we are growing amongst perennial Helianthus

Talking of tidying, there is plenty of pruning to be done now; deadheading certainly, but also major replacement pruning of shrubs like Philadelphus. Our rambling Roses are in need of a serious amount of work, the Lavender hedges should have been trimmed a while ago and some of the herbaceous plants will have old flowering stems removed in due course.

It’s a great time of the year for cuttings and while Caryopteris and some Salvias have already been removed, newly rooted from the propagator, others are going in almost daily. At the moment there is a batch of Kiwi (Actinidia) cuttings, harvested from an overgrown plant belonging to a neighbour, a nice variegated Datura and a pretty little Salvia from the local park. Pushing my luck a bit, I am trying a few Magnolia stellata as give-aways for friends.

Sunflower Orange Sun

I have asked one of the characters I meet regularly when dog walking if I can have a few cuttings from his garden. He has a particularly fine red Lagerstroemia we have our eyes on, a hedge of those tricolor willows with the Japanese name which escapes me for the moment and an orange variety of Campsis, all of which are worth a try. We will perhaps wait until we return from our holiday in September before taking “security cuttings” – cuttings of plants which may or may not survive the winter when left out of doors. Salvias, again, are a good example, but there are many more and it is important to get these nicely rooted before the cold weather comes around again.

It is important to sit back and relax, and especially important to take time to enjoy your garden and the individual plants which make it up, but gardening, actually getting out and getting your hands dirty, is for me and many other simple souls, what it is all about. I shall continue to potter happily throughout the year and delight in doing so.

South African plants in a French garden

Dierama pulcherrimum?

When a student from some distant shore enrols with the Garden Design Academy it is an opportunity to look at what we grow and see what plants might be familiar to gardeners in that country. A group of South Africans have booked for a two week residential garden design course and I have been out in the garden looking for plants native to the Cape and surrounding regions. My Grandmother lived in colonial South Africa and my Father was born in Cape Town, giving this region, which I have never visited, an extra interest to me.

Eucomis bicolor – a memory of my Grandmother’s garden

Our sunny, central island bed seemed a likely area to start and just three plants from the house-end of this bed comes our first discovery: Dierama or Angel’s fishing rod. There are around 50 species of Dierama in the Eastern Cape and I have always assumed mine is D. pulcherrimum, though I stand to be corrected. My mother first introduced me to this plant after growing it from seed but my own plants were collected from an abandoned Cornish garden in the village where my Grandmother lived. From her garden came our plant of Eucomis bicolor, a bulbous perennial which has proved its hardiness by surviving a spell at -26C last winter. I rescued it from a pot in the garden nearly a year after my Grandmother had died and treasure it as a memory of her. It has the most amazing flower spike, the form of which gives it its common name of Pineapple Flower.

Kniphofia Timothy

Barely three paces away we come to our next subject, a clump of Kniphofia Timothy with grass like leaves and bright orange flowers. The Red Hot Pokers seem to withstand anything when established but we did loose young plants, including divisions from this one, during the late winter cold snap. Further on, at the end of the bed and struggling under a large variegated Miscanthus grass, the South African succulent Lampranthus, with outrageously bright pink flowers, opens its buds in the sun and closes them every evening or on dull days. We have a much better plant in full sun in the front garden.

Crocosmia George Davidson

On the opposite corner of the island bed we grow Hemerocallis in two varieties; elsewhere in the garden we have another three. I always assumed some Day Lilies were South African but now know this is not the case: you live and learn! I thought I was on safer ground with the next plant as Canna could not look more typically South African– except that it is from America! Fortunately we also have Crocosmia in the bed, and this really is from South Africa. One of our clumps is of an attractive orange-yellow colour and labelled George Davidson but may not be. Whatever the name, this Montbretia is a cheerful thing and battles gently with the neighbouring Salvia uliginosa, which towers over it.

Gazanias

Unless I’m much mistaking (and to err is the gardeners’ lot) that completes the list from the island bed and the border on the west boundary offers nothing at all. Alongside the eastern boundary and the swimming pool we do better with Gladioli – both species and Dutch florist types – and a number of bedding plants including Gazania, Diascia, Dimorphotheca and Felicia. Several Salvias hail from these parts but I don’t think any of ours do. In pots we have plenty of Pelargoniums which I think it is safe to add to our South Africa list, and in the front garden Phygelius in three varieties.

I keep planting Agapanthus and they keep dying on me and a big potted Clivia went the same way as the Nerines, which is to say, they too are no longer with us. I am looking forward to meeting our students from Pretoria in September and hope they will not be too appalled at my attempts to grow South African native plants.