December 2020
As we end this, the strangest and most unpredictable of years, the garden is reassuringly true to its December form. It falls into the rhythm and pattern that December inexorably brings of grey, dull days, the garden as drab and washed out as at any point in in any year. This is not good - but at least it is reliably consistent. Climate change means that snow in December is now rare and frost become much less common. Both are replaced by a kind of sullen damp that varies between uncomfortable mildness to bone-chilling cold. There is a strong case for battening down the hatches and venturing outside as little as possible.
But not strong enough. In these brief midwinter days when the light creeps out from under nightfall at 8 in the morning and slinks back again by 4.30 in the afternoon, the importance of getting outside is more urgent than ever.
And climate change means that now December has little floral gems to find and rejoice in. This year there are primroses flowering, winter honeysuckles, the first hellebores, violets, roses, - even the delphiniums in the Jewel Garden were still blooming at the beginning of the month. The crab apples on the marvellous ‘Comptesse de Paris’ never look better and the birds have not yet eaten all the hips and haws that bejewel the hedgerows.
Every afternoon without fail I walk the dogs in the fields around the garden and despite the mud and the gloom, invariably feel better for doing so - and of course Nellie and Patti love it!
GREEN!
The winter garden absolutely depends upon good evergreens and I regard them as the most important plants in any garden at any time of year because they are the bones upon which all the floral flesh hangs. When all those flowers are gone what remains can - and should - have a stark sculptural beauty of its own.
Yew makes the best evergreen hedge as well as large topiary and Irish Yews make a bold statement without taking up much space.
Ten years ago I would have said that Box was essential but the box blight has ravaged the box hedges in this garden and box caterpillar - which are yet to deal with - is making it almost unviable in many areas. However if neither are present in your area no other plant is better for smaller hedges or topiary.
Holly makes a fine tree, hedge and topiary albeit in places where you will not brush against it too much. I like to use Mahonia of all kinds in the borders and Sarcococca, Hebe, Choisya, Portuguese laurels, Viburnum, Camellias, Phillyrea, Pittisporum, Skimmia, Pyracantha, Euonymus and the magnificent Holm Oak are all really good evergreen options.
CHRISTMAS TREES
Until a couple of hundred years ago the only evergreens available in midwinter were Yew, Holly, Ivy, Box and Juniper and the latter was and still is pretty rare in this country. There is no reason why any could not still serve as a Christmas tree. But the vast majority of people will be buying their Christmas trees from a range of non-native specimens, the most popular of which are, Norway Spruce (Picea abies), The Nordman Fir (Abies nordmanniana,) or the Colorado Spruce (Picea pungens). All three are very good, have specific virtues and can last for a long Christmas season if looked after properly. All three will also grow in most gardens if they are bought with healthy roots and planted carefully as soon as possible after Christmas (see below).
Spruce is actually short for ‘Spruce Fir’ which is the English translation of Picea abies and a corruption of ‘Prussian Fir’. The Norway Spruce has been grown in this country for at least the last 500 years as a timber tree. Unlike our own evergreen natives – all of which grow conspicuously slowly – Picea abies grows very fast and for centuries it was the main source of softwood, or deal.
Although almost everyone nowadays only comes into contact with it as a tree small enough to fit easily into the living room, it is officially Europe’s largest tree and given the right conditions of damp, cold winters and damp, cool summers, it will grow to more than 200ft tall. It is very resistant to cold and frost-hardy although it never thrives when grown on chalk or limestone.
If you get confused between any of the Spruces (Picea) and Firs (Abies) - there is one easy way to differentiate the two species. The cones of spruces hang down whereas the cones of Firs stand up like candles.
Abies nordmanniana, The Caucasian or Nordman fir is much more truly evergreen than the Norway Spruce in that it only sheds its needles after about 15 years before replacing them. It also has more horizontal and rather more dense branches. The effect can make a more compact, more evenly shaped Christmas tree. It originates from the Eastern shores of the Black sea and will grow even bigger than the Norway Spruce, reaching 225ft. It grows on limestone in its Caucasian home but like the Norway Spruce it grows best in moist, cool, slightly acidic conditions.
Personally I like the Colorado, or Blue, Spruce, Picea pungens, best as a Christmas tree. Although it comes from the southern states, it originates from a high altitude, so is very hardy and grows into a tall, very straight, rather beautiful tree, with glaucous blue needles the colour of cardoon or artichoke leaves. The high altitude and bright mountain light gives it a rather stiff habit which is one of its main attractions as a Christmas tree. If you do plant one in the garden it will grow much stronger if given maximum sunlight.
Whatever tree you choose here are tips to make it last as long as possible:
DO get one with roots if possible, even if you are not intending to plant it. Pot it into as large a container as you have and fill this with sharpsand or compost. Sand is perfectly good for the few weeks it will be indoors. Water it and keep the sand moist.
Buy a tree holder for a cut stump with a reservoir and keep it topped up with water. Treat it like a cut flower. This will do more than anything to stop it shedding its needles.
NEVER place your Christmas tree by a radiator. It will respond by immediately shedding its needles.
Keep it as cool as possible. All these evergreen firs have adapted to cope with cold winter weather and will react to central heating heat by dropping their leaves in order to conserve moisture. A draughty hallway is ideal.
Take your tree to the council shredder after Christmas if you are not going to plant it so it can be recycled.
From ‘My Garden World’
GREAT TITS
The bird table is busy and none are busier than the various tits. Blue tits are easy to identify, whilst the long-tailed tits instantly present themselves in a cluster of tiny soft bodies attached to the eponymous long tail. Coal tits are shy and elusive and quite hard to identify. They are the size of a blue tit but look a bit like a great tit – until you see them next to each other and then you realise they don’t look like each other at all.
The Great Tit, Parus major, is bigger and, like the blue tit, has a swagger about it. Their colouring is clear and self-proclaiming: black head, white cheeks, black bib running down the centre of its chest against yellow breast feathers, and greeny-blue wings with a distinctive white stripe. In males, the black bib goes all the way down to its belly and tail but in females, it peters out around the belly. The population density of great tits is greatly influenced by the availability of beech mast – the seeds of the common beech, Fagus sylvatica. This, like oaks and their acorns, tends to have irregular, exceptionally productive years and the great tit population booms in line with these ‘mast years’.
In the breeding season, Great Tits look for protein, feeding themselves and their young on insects and invertebrates of all kinds. They have also been known to kill other small birds and, in a deliciously dark detail, peck out the brains of hibernating pipistrelle bats.
Their repetitive two-note call probably can be heard on just about every Gardeners’ World sequence ever filmed in this garden as it is an almost constant backdrop in spring and summer. I have read that the birds actually have dozens of variations on this basic see-saw call but confess I have not noted such niceties.
We once, with great expertise on the part of a technician from the BBC Natural History Unit, set up a bird box for great tits. There were cameras both inside the nesting box and covering every possible approach. However, the great tits in this garden chose to ignore it completely. The cameras remained optimistically trained and on for a whole year but recorded absolutely nothing. All the while, the birds continued to nest happily as ever, elsewhere in the garden. Eventually, the whole thing was packed up and taken to a more rewarding venue. I have found Great Tits’ nests in all kinds of places, and a few times in the tangle of a clematis – with Nigel hairs lining the mossy cup.
BRAMLEY SEEDLING APPLE
My favourite fruit on a cold winter’s day is a baked apple and Bramley Seedling makes up an astonishing 90% of all cooking apples sold in Britain. Many gardens also host these lovely, spreading trees. In fact the home-grown apple is rather different from the shop-bought type as it can be allowed to ripen for longer and is consequentially much nicer.
It should not be called a Bramley at all as it was first grown from seed by Mary Brailsford in Southwell, Nottinghamshire between 1809 and 1813. The first grafts from the original tree were taken in 1876, 24 years after Mary Brailsford’s death, by a nurseryman called Henry Merryweather. To do so he had to obtain permission from the then owner of the house, one Matthew Bramley, who was the local butcher - and hence the name. In 1883 Merryweather was awarded a first class certificate for the apple at the national Apple Congress held by the RHS.
The first commercial Bramley orchards were planted in 1890 and the original tree, grown by Mary Brailsford is - sort of - still standing. It blew over in a storm in 1900 but regrew from a branch that rooted into the ground.
I have two Bramley Seedlings growing in the orchard here and both are now fine, large trees and have provided us with hundreds of superb large cooking apples this year which are all carefully harvested and stored. Kept frost-free but cool, they will last well into spring and we eat them through the winter months almost daily.
What to do in the garden this month:
TULIPS
Keep planting tulips. As long as they are in the ground or potted up by Christmas they will flower absolutely normally next April and May. Remember that depth is always a virtue when planting most bulbs and especially tulips, especially if they are to be permanent. However if you treat them as annuals and know you are going to move them after flowering, just stick them in the ground at any depth - but make sure they are the right way up!
CLEAN PLASTIC POTS AND LABELS
We are all now trying to use much less plastic in our lives and especially so in the garden. However, the worst offender is single-use plastic and the more that you can reuse a plastic container or plant label the better. The easiest way to do that is to wash all your plastic pots and store them carefully in sizes so that they are ready for use in spring. The better you care for them, the longer they will last - and the less plastic you will buy.
As for plant labels, wash them all and then, when they are dry, take some wire wool and scrub each one clean of last year’s writing. Permanent marker, biro and pencil all comes off very easily this way. I do this every year to hundreds of plant labels and reuse the same ones many times. Not only does this cut down dramatically on plastic use but also saves money.
LAY AND REPAIR PATHS
We have been making paths for the past month here in the garden, especially around the new greenhouse. Gradually we have been extending our hard paths right over the garden because although grass is fine in dry weather and obviously very easy and cheap - for most of the year here they are slick with mud.
Although there is a wide range of surfaces that you can use for paths - and we vary between brick, York stone and concrete pavers - what happens beneath that final surface is always the same and always essential. A path is only as good as its foundations.
We start with a trench 12 - 18 inches deep, half of which is filled with hardcore, of broken bricks and stones, then a generous layer of scalpings tamped down very hard, then a thick layer of sand on which the pavers or bricks are laid. If you have very well-drained soil you probably won't need the hardcore layers, but for us it is essential to ensure drainage and stop subsidence.
WASHING EXISTING SLIPPERY PATHS
At this time of year brick and stone paths can be very slippery and dangerous. This is due to algae that grows on the surface, especially if wet and shaded and at this time of year they may stay wet and slippery for months. The best way to reduce the slipperiness is to wash off the algae with a pressure hose (which can be hired by the day). When this is done brush in sharpsand. If the path is brick or stone the porous surface will absorb some of the sand. A quicker - still quite laborious - alternative is simply to work sand in with a stiff brush without the washing. Either way you have a very effective way of making a path safe without resorting to chemicals.
ONIONS FROM SEED
This is always one of my Boxing Day jobs. Onions are mostly grown from sets put out when the ground is ready between January and April, but seed sown ones have the great advantage of starting earlier so having a longer growing season and, best of all, there is a much wider range of varieties to choose from than the very limited selection of sets that any garden centre can provide.
The seeds are sown in plugs of potting compost - ideally three or four seeds per plugs - and put somewhere warm to germinate. I plant them out as small blocks of seedlings in spring as soon as the soil warms up.
SHARPENING TOOLS
If it is hammering with rain outside or simply so cold your fingers cannot function, you can still go through all your tools and make sure that they are in as good condition as possible for next year.
One of the most satisfying jobs is to clean and sharpen all cutting implements. Hoes can be sharpened with a rough whetstone so they slice through weeds rather than bruise them, secateurs can have all rust removed with wire wool and a little elbow grease and then sharpened as you would a knife so that they can easily and accurately. Sharp secateurs are both better for the plant because they leave a neat, clean cut rather than tearing at it, and much safer for the gardener too because you can focus on where and how you are cutting rather than trying to force it at all.
CLEAR POND
The best way to introduce wildlife into your garden is to have a pond, even if it is only made in a container. However it is important to remove all fallen leaves before they sink to the bottom and start to decompose, otherwise the nutritional balance of the water will be badly affected and although you will not notice the impact of this immediately, next Spring your precious aquatic plants will suffer adversely as well as the range of wildlife in the water. Gently scoop out all fallen leaves and dead tissue, trying to disturb the water - and the life within it - as little as possible.
PLANT HELLEBORES
Every year I treat myself to a few really good new varieties of Hellebores and add them to the hundreds I already have growing. This extend of the range adds clean, clear colours that can run from pure white to the almost black inky purple of ‘Black Diamond’ or ‘Queen of Night’.
Hellebores are usually expensive to buy but they are good value because they last for a very long time and occasionally a self sown hybrid marries the best qualities of its parents rather than blending the worst.
Hellebores have deep roots and I always dig a bucket-sized hole and add mushroom compost or leaf mould to it when planting. Keep them well watered for the first year but thereafter they need little attention. However a December job is always to go through them all removing any leaves that have fallen past 45 degrees or that are affected by blight. I then finish the job in mid February so that the flowers can be clearly seen.
TAKE PICTURES
Take the time to go outside and photograph every aspect and angle of your garden. It does not matter how abandoned, neglected or empty it may be. Photograph what is there with a detached and enquiring eye. This is a process of reckoning, of stock-taking and will provide you with hard evidence of what lies at the bedrock of your garden. It is a truism that any garden can look good in high summer but only good gardens look good in midwinter. So use the pictures to plan both how to make your garden look really good at this time of year and to plan for the glorious days that will start to creep in before very long.
POINSETTIA
Hundreds of thousands of poinsettias will be given as gifts this Christmas and with a little care these can be made to last looking good for months.
Poinsettias are only really comfortable in damp warmth. Modern poinsettias grown as houseplants are treated with a growth retardant to create the familiar short, bushy shape we all know and love but in their native Mexico poinsettias grow at the margin of the forest to a large 10ft high shrub.
They do not like cool nights, very hot dry rooms or big fluctuations in temperatures, so keep them where there is a constant average temperature, avoiding draughts, cold windows or even very bright spots that can get very hot in the middle of the day. They like plenty of water but let the compost dry out before giving them a really good soak, standing the pot in a sink full of water and leaving it to stand for 10 minutes or so before letting the excess water drain from the pot.
RHUBARB
If you have productive rhubarb clear away any rotting stems and foliage and mulch round (but not over) each crown with a generous layer of manure or compost. If your rhubarb is a little tired now is the time to divide some of your crowns to stimulate fresh vigour. The older, central section of the big, corky roots should be put on the compost and the younger, outer sections of root replanted with the buds about an inch below the surface. Do not pick any stalks from these new sections for the first year and cut the flowers off as they appear. By the second year you should have a good crop and a really good one two years after planting.
PLANTING SHALLOT SETS
Plant shallot sets close to the shortest day (Dec 21st) and they will be ready to harvest on the longest day, (June 21st). If you have a piece of ground ready that is dry enough for the soil not to stick to your boots then plant them directly outside, 9 inches apart in rows about a foot apart. This makes them easy to hoe. Do not completely bury them but leave the shoulder of the bulb and tips clear of the soil. I suggest covering them with fleece until March, by which time they should be well rooted and able to resist birds tugging at them. Check them weekly to firm back any that have been dislodged.
Alternatively, if like me, your soil is wet and heavy for months on end, you can plant them now into plugs, just burying them deep enough to sit in the compost. Keep them in a greenhouse or cold frame and then plant out when your soil is ready and has warmed up.
Suggested varieties: ‘Red Sun’ (lovely rich red) ‘Longor’ (French long bulbs with pink flesh) ‘Topper’ round, golden bulbs with a sweet flavour.