January may be the beginning of the calendar year, but savvy gardeners know that preparation for the next growing season can start in September. Fall is a great time for the kind of analysis, planning, and implementation that will lead to a gorgeous garden in 2001!
Take a look at your landscape with a critical eye. If you’ve taken pictures during the year, now is the time to review them. Move through your garden bed by bed, taking notes, recording both facts and impressions.
Start with the big picture: are beds themselves deep enough, or have plants begun to encroach on lawn or pavement? The answer may be bigger beds, but perhaps some judicious plant editing will do the trick. If you decide that you are ready to expand, fall is a fine time to attack bed preparation—cooler temperatures make the task more pleasant, and plant divisions can find homes in these new spaces. Starting the process in fall can allow you to circumvent sod removal, too: cover the new planting area with several layers of newspaper, water well, and top with 2-4” of double shredded hardwood mulch. Come spring, the sod will have died, the newspaper deteriorated, and you can rototill this top dressing of rich organic material into the soil base of the new bed. So do the tedious work now, and savor the joys of plant selection over the winter. You’ll be ready to jump right into planting when the days warm up again.
Don’t forget to assess hardscape elements. Are walks and patios of sufficient size and in good condition, or has the time come to contemplate replacement? Paving pros often have slots in their schedules at this time of year, so beat the spring rush by doing the project now. A bonus of fall installation is that the inevitable damage to neighboring plants caused by construction is less distressing as the growing season winds down.
Perhaps some areas of your lawn have thinned because of increasing shade. Cool weather and autumn rains provide ideal conditions for establishing new groundcover plantings. Or think about adding a new garden area under the tree canopy, replacing sparse grass with the lush textures of shade-loving plants.
Let your memory wander through the landscape season-by-season. Were you satisfied with the sequence of color, or do you crave a more vibrant scene? Try to pinpoint gaps in bloom time, and begin to record the characteristics plants should have to merit inclusion in your revised garden. It’s not necessary to identify specific botanical solutions at this point; instead, think of the process in very general terms. For example, you might note that you need a mid-size plant that produces big, deep pink flowers in August. Armed with this kind of “wish list”, you can dedicate the off-season to the search for the perfect plant.
Make observations about plant habits and performance as well. Would some specimens have benefited from timely staking or pinching back? And are you willing to add those tasks to your garden chore list? If not, dig the needy plant out, find a home for it in the domain of an obsessive/compulsive gardening friend, and treat yourself to a low-maintenance replacement.
Perhaps a perennial performed well, but its placement lacked punch. The solution may lie in a well-chosen companion plant. Any autumnal garden inventory should include observations about texture as well as color. Many of the loveliest perennials have relatively short bloom times, so the best gardens contain a bounty of beautiful foliage plants as well, to carry the design through downtime.
Questions arise at this time of year about dividing perennials. In general, the best time to divide a perennial is shortly after it completes its flowering period. Peonies and daylilies, however, are traditionally divided in fall. While daylilies respond to this process with increased vigor and generous blooms, some plants (peonies and Siberian iris among them) may fail to flower in the year following division.
Bulb catalogs flood our summer mailboxes, and it’s hard to resist their colorful allure. Planting a cache of bulbs on a crisp fall afternoon is a gesture of hope, belief in gardens to come. These are the moments gardeners live for! But if ravenous rodents lurk in your landscape, bulb planting may seem futile. A few simple measures implemented at planting time will improve the blooming odds of your bulbs. Cayenne pepper sprinkled liberally in the planting hole will deter all but the most determined squirrel or chipmunk from digging up a bulb. A few Allium caeruleum tossed into a hole dug for larger bulbs will not only keep critters at bay, but will yield a charming companion bloom. Rodents find these onion-family relatives unpalatable both below and above ground, so alliums offer some degree of protection to budding stalks as well.
And don’t limit your bulb purchases to spring bloomers if your summer garden lacks pizzazz. Asiatic and Oriental lilies bring stature, variety, and fragrance to the mixed border—and they do it without gobbling up a lot of valuable space. In colors ranging from white through pastels to dramatic deeps, lilies are available in sizes from two-foot dwarfs to six-foot giants.
Resolve to begin the new gardening season with a comprehensive fall inventory. Plotting a gardening game plan now will pay off in more ways that you expect.
Amy Reynolds is a landscape designer at The Planter’s Palette