Carol Klein shares her advice on how to keep your garden looking its best
We all want our exuberant gardens to go on looking their best for as long as possible
Here at Glebe Cottage, we’re still trying to keep up with ourselves. Despite lockdown and spending more time at home (which is just the same thing as saying spending more time in the garden), there are still not enough hours in the day.
It’s easy at this time of year, when everything is at its most exuberant, not to let the garden get away from you, but we’re determined to help it be the best it can. There are compromises that have to be made, especially now the one day a week of help I had has disappeared.
Sometimes it’s a question of neglecting part of the garden temporarily to concentrate on another part, which will benefit from some swift attention. Though nowhere stands still, the shady part of the garden slows down during summer. We’ve already missed removing all the stems of cow parsley (there’ll be thousands of self-sown seedlings to weed out next spring), there are still old hellebore flowers to remove and more foxgloves to plant to flower next year. The gravel paths need hoeing and lurking under some of the trees and shrubs there’s still the old, shrivelled foliage of snowdrops and snowflakes.
But it'll all have to wait. Across the track on the sunnier side of the garden, it's almost reached the stage where you’re wondering whether you should be sporting a pith helmet and wielding a machete.
Plants are beginning to fight for space and some are lurching forward at alarming angles. We stake as little as we can and as far as possible, we plant to encourage plants to hold each other up. I’m full of admiration for those gardens where staking is done subtly, sympathetically but soundly.
Wollerton Old Hall Garden in Shropshire, where we visited for a forthcoming programme on Channel 5, is a perfect example. Everything looked happy and even the tallest delphinium, heading for 3m (10ft) during an exceptional growing year, had its own stake – two had been tied together to give it the support it needed.
At this stage in our garden, twiggy pea sticks, having supported our first crop of peas, have now been repurposed, purloined to help perennials stick to the plot!
Some of the earlier-flowering perennials need to be cut back. Geranium pratense, the meadow cranesbill, has had its moment in the spotlight, but now all those brown seed heads and stems must be removed, cut back to the ground. Even if this operation is performed with shears, new foliage will reassert itself within a matter of weeks and plants may reflower. The same goes for most geraniums.
The rules about where to cut back to are very simple. Where flowered stems have finished completely they’re now nonproductive and, unless you’re saving their seed, should be cut back to the ground.
Where a terminal flower spike or cluster has finished but there are others lower down to follow, then cutting back to the next bud down will enable the rest to flower properly.
This is tantamount to deadheading, the other vital practice at this time of year. Flowers are there to produce seed so when a plant has set seed, it follows that the performance of subsidiary flowers is less important. If you want your cosmos, dahlias, helenium and rudbeckia to continue peak performance then, as petals start to fade, chop them off down to the next bud. It’s an easy and rewarding task – we all want our gardens to go on looking their best for as long as possible!
'It's almost reached the stage where you’re wondering whether you should be sporting a pith helmet and wielding a machete!'