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A sleeping garden Shaw Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA. |
"It is pleasant to see the garden laid to bed for the winter. [White] blankets of earth cover the secret roots. Nothing is seen overground, but a lot is going on underneath in preparation for the spring. I think it is a good plan to leave a heavy mulch of fallen leaves over the flowering shrubs instead of sweeping them all away. They serve the double purpose of providing protection against frost, and eventually rotting down into the valuable humus that all plants need. There are leaves and leaves, of course, and not all of them will rot as quickly as others. Oak and beech are the best, to compost into leaf mold in a large square pile, but any leaves will serve as a mulch over beds and borders throughout the hard months to come.
The professional gardener will raise objections. He will tell you that the leaves will 'blow all over the place' as soon as the wind gets up. This is true to a point but can be prevented by a light scattering of sod or sand over the leaves to hold them down. This objection may often be overcome by the application of some common sense. There are few people more obstinate than the professional or jobbing gardener. Stuck in his ideas, he won't budge.
It is well worthwhile to search rather carefully for any stray seedlings which may have lain concealed beneath fallen leaves and the dead stalks of herbaceous stuff. It is surprising how many shrubs will thus reproduce themselves, even at some distance from their parent. They may be only a few inches high when found, but by next spring they should start growing into useful little plants if you lift them with their roots intact and pot them up and sink the pots in a nursery row, either in ashes, sand, or ordinary sod. The point of sinking the pots is to safeguard them from being frozen hard, as they would be if left standing nakedly in the open.
I have found more unexpected things: thriving little children of myrtle and the sweet-scented bay; the graceful Indigofer; clerodendron of the turquoise-blue berries; Solanum jaminoides, that energetic climber; and even self-sown yews which if only I had had the sense and foresight to regiment a long a drill years ago would be now have developed into a neat clippable hedge.
This is all satisfactory enough, but there are even more exciting possibilities. There is the chance that one of these stray seedlings may turn out to be better than its parent, or at any rate different. I believe I am right in saying that Rosa highdownensis, that lovely hybrid of R. moyesii, appeared accidentally in Sir Frederick Stern garden at Highdown, and that Caryopteris clandownsis of a deeper blue than either Caryopteri mongolica or C. incana, was suddenly noticed by the present secretary of the RHS in his own garden at Clandon. Of course, to spot these finds you have to be endowed with a certain degree of serendipity, meaning you have to be endowed with the faculty of 'making discoveries by accident and sagacity' of something you were not deliberately in quest of. Scuffle about for yourself, before you let a jobbing gardener loose on beds or borders."
Vita Sackville-West. The Illustrated Garden Book. London. Michael Joseph Ltd, 1986.
Good gardening to you all in 2023.
