An autumn in Asturias
20 January 2024
By: James Lennox
Only a poet would think of autumn as a time of mists and mellow fruitfulness, all generous rewards and gentle decay. For this gardener, in between equinoctial gales and drenching downpours, it's one of the busiest times of the gardening year. It's certainly not the season to suck on a pencil and come over all wistful.
Yes, there are crisp mornings with thick mist lingering in the hollows until midday. And yes, there are unearned harvests to gather - walnuts and chestnuts, persimmons and figs.
But the main theme of autumn in this garden is unrelenting activity. I only have myself to blame. I'm a firm believer in two-season gardening: winter is for hunkering down indoors with a whisky, a good book and the occasional glance out of the window; spring is three months of trying to stay on top of an unstoppable surge of growth; summer is for sipping cold drinks in the shade and criticising other people's wilting gardens; and autumn is for catching up and, if I'm really at the top of my game, getting ahead.
Spring comes early and fast in Asturias, so I don't have the luxury of leaving the tidying up until March. Don't get the wrong impression. Mine is by no means an immaculate garden; nor is it a complete free-for-all. I strive for that happy medium - evidence of a guiding hand with a naturalistic, laissez-faire bent.
On the great debate raging all around us - whether or not to put the garden to bed for the duration - I refuse to take sides. Both approaches have their merits, but I would hate to be hamstrung by any rigid system. Instead, I merely set about whichever task takes my fancy whenever I like, provided it won't damage the plants, the soil, the friendlier inhabitants or my back.
Once they're all off the trees, and not a moment sooner or else I'll just end up repeating the job after every breath of wind, leaves are swept off hard paths, raked off grass paths and then ceremoniously dumped on beds, borders and beyond. With a bit of luck, they'll stay put and break down imperceptibly. If I'm feeling particularly frisky, I might even give the grass one last cut. But not this year, the weather got in the way. I doubt the grass will notice the difference.
In a mild, wet winter zone like Asturias, some things are best chopped down sooner rather than later. Nobody will be taking artistic shots of low sun lighting up the frost-rimed seedheads of perennials or ornamental grasses round these parts. Soggy brown heaps of mush are enough to put anyone off their winter whisky.
And so it's off to the compost heap with the withered top growth of asters and echinaceas, salvias and rudbeckias. Out come the snapped flowering stalks of Stipa gigantea and the seedheads of Calamagrostis brachytricha, already picked clean by the sparrows. Evergreen grasses have a good comb out; deciduous grasses, including the towering columns of Miscanthus sinensis, are cut back now before fresh shoots appear. (A side note: save yourself years of grief and steer clear of M. sinensis, it's a veritable monster to cut down, impossible to compost and a chore to lug to the bonfire. If you must, go for a well-behaved cultivar and chose very wisely.)
Swathes of buddleias and shrubby dogwoods are reduced to knobbly stumps, again sooner rather than later to beat the emergence of new growth. Yes, I lose the colourful stems of the dogwood, but after a couple of months looking at them in one's own garden, who isn't bored rigid by seeing them threaded through every winter garden until the end of March? To the bonfire with the lot, I say.
All of which is nothing but basic house-keeping, the horticultural equivalent of dusting and hoovering. No soil is disturbed, no critters made homeless, no fine judgments made. Critical faculties are only engaged when it comes to the next stage of the autumn campaign - rose and tree pruning.
The roses I tackle just before Christmas. There seems to be a very tight window of opportunity between them dropping their leaves in November and breaking into bud as early as January in a mild winter. I resolved to be strict with them this year. They all require individual treatment and, while it's tempting to resort to a hedge-trimmer if not a chainsaw, I generally stick to a sharp pair of secateurs, at least two pairs of gloves, long sleeves and a quiet determination to curb their enthusiasm.
Some need more attention than others: Mme. Hardy was merely showing signs of middle-aged spread, while the Rambling Rector was making his annual bid for freedom across the top of the grotto and my particular Nemesis, R. wichuraiana, was threatening to pull down a sizeable Parrotia persica in its quest for world domination. Believe me, there's great satisfaction to be had from consigning armfuls of the Memorial Rose to the bonfire to mingle with the Miscanthus's ashes.
Tree pruning brings a different sort of satisfaction. It's a sign that a garden is developing, attaining a certain level of maturity. I have recurring nightmares about amputating limbs at the wrong time of year and being unable to stem the flow of sap, so a compulsory check in that bible of tree and shrub pruning, Brown and Kirkham's Essential Pruning Techniques precedes any lopping.
The skirts on the sweetgums along the Avenue were lifted, honey locusts were de-tangled (particularly at eye-level), oaks were relieved of superfluous branches, buckeyes were beautified and birches were barely touched. Nothing too radical, more a light touch intervention, but immediately certain trees looked less like saplings and, well, more tree-like. And this year I even remembered to allow for the weight of the leaves pulling branches down in the summer - there are few things more annoying than having to duck under the same branch every time until next pruning season.
This past autumn, however, I couldn't linger too long on the routine maintenance jobs. In fact, I rarely went beyond the bare minimum. Instead of fine-tuning the planting combinations, lifting and dividing the herbaceous perennials, tackling the topiary and taking countless photos (all the jobs properly organised gardeners find time for), we got side-tracked. The field next door came up for sale, We couldn't resist - a blank canvas, an opportunity to expand the garden, to plant all those trees I'd run out of room for. Which gardener in his right mind wouldn't want to jump right in? And while we're at it, why not clear out the adjacent ravine? You know, the one that once upon a time had been used as the village rubbish dump?
But that's a tale for another day.
