Features
Autumn Plans
Reviewing my garden, made on the side of a clay filled drumlin in East Cavan, I ponder the lessons learnt from a cold, wet and sunless summer. How close a balance there is between crop productivity, weather and micro-environment. Seen particularly outside in the vegetable garden, my sun and heat-loving sweetcorn and cucurbits are dodgy while the adaptable legumes and Northern European staple root crops are doing fine. The excessive rain must have washed out a lot of nutrients and I vow to add lots of compost throughout the garden this Autumn. A few temperature degrees less, infrequent sun, soil continually rinsed by rain and the garden is thrown into mild disarray...another lesson in the need for plant diversity and to understand and work with one's environment. The flower garden is fine, perhaps more vegetative growth than usual and not quite as much flower. I am short on annuals and half-hardy annuals which are valuable gap fillers. Planting them out in early summer was like laying out a salad bar and inviting all and sundry to help themselves!
Spring garden
The great thing about gardening is that hope springs eternal and never more so than on a fine autumn day, with the soil still warm and robins thinly and plaintively twittering in the background. Everyone should have an area, ideally viewed from the window of your winter cosy room, devoted solely for winter and spring plants. So make a spring garden and let it be cool, quiet and foliage rich in summer - an area to be passed through as you progress through to more flower-filled summer delights. Choose a small tree providing winter and spring interest in its shape, flowers (scented if possible) and good summer leaf. Safe and predictable would be Acer palmatum atropurpureum , Hamameles mollis (best bought in flower when you can check its scent) or Magnolia stellata . For more unusual small trees go to Hilberry Garden Centre, Crecora, Co. Limerick or Carbury Nursery, Clondalkin, Co. Dublin; possibly choose a smart evergreen such as Phillyrea latifolia or the larger Daphniphyllum macropodum . They will help you. Buy as big as you can afford so that it will make a strong feature as a starting point and provide shade rapidly. The best winter evergreen perennials are the Hellebores: easy to grow, varied and long lasting in flower and great for keeping weeds down. Use the almost shrub-like Helleborus corcicus and Helleborus foetidus . Helleborus orientalis is more colourful, from pure white to darkest maroon and the most sought after and bankrupting are the doubles and anemone centred ones. Ferns associate well and are best planted in September: try the evergreen Adiantum pedatum , Blechnum , Dryopteris erythrosora and Polystichum aculeatum . Search out different lungworts, Pulmonaria, with their varied foliage markings and flower colour and Epimediums for value in leaves. Hostas are great, especially the more slug resistant leathery blue leaved ones as their emerging leaves help to cover bulbs as they die back. Perennial Geraniums are essential, and there is one of these for each month of the year.
Spring bulbs
The mainstay of the spring garden is of course bulbs which should be bought and planted now. Don't be restricted to snowdrops (even though there are over a hundred species and varieties) and narcissi or large flowering Dutch crocus. Some of the species Crocus are wonderful: Crocus chrysanthus 'Blue Pearl', 'Snow Bunting' and 'Cream Beauty' for example. I have had the greatest value from the wildflowers Anemone blanda 'White Splendour' and 'Blue Shades', planted in broad patches of a single colour. Erythroniums, the dog's tooth violets are just as easy but lesser known, in particular Erythronium dens canis and 'E. White Beauty' and 'Pagoda'. The best small blue bulbs are the squills, dark blue Scilla 'Spring Beauty' or Scilla bifolia, Puschkinia libanotica , and Glory of the Snow Chionodoxa forbesii.
Bulbs for Naturalising
Here, one of our greatest gardening thrills is the appearance in early March of sheets and sheets of the purple crocus Crocus vernus. Planted decades ago, probably under a beech long since fallen, these brave little bulbs appear year after year and have seeded themselves into all the adjacent fields. Naturalising bulbs is very much a matter of trial and error to discover which are suited to your environment (a neighbouring friend has masses of Aconites while mine are fading away). Plant a generous starter pack and wait and see what happens. Really all bulbs have potential for naturalising. Snowdrops are best planted green after flowering and in my experience planting bought in bulbs is a waste of money; much better to make a raid on a friend with lots or dare I suggest a derelict cottage! This year try Narcissus Old Pheasants Eye, Cammassia leichtlinni caerulea and C. cusickii in longer grass for something different, splendid and failsafe. Mr. Middleton's, 58 Mary St. Dublin1 ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) has a good bulb catalogue and does efficient mail order throughout the country. For more unusual bulbs try De Jager in Kent (00441622831235) or Broadleigh Bulbs (www. broadleighbulbs.co.uk) who do ship to Ireland. As always it is hard to recommend organic growers. Choose bulb suppliers who have a conservation policy and who do not collect from the wild. When recommending suppliers of other plants I try to recommend the smaller, specialist supplier who knows and likes growing plants ... in other words whose heart is in the right place!
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