Happy Autumn Days

Happy autumn days, harvesting flowers and beautiful turning foliage, and making a start on this season’s new planting. We still have some wall space to cover at Downton, which will become an exciting canvas upon which to arrange more varieties of rambling roses, intermingled with some lovely jasmines, honeysuckles and clematis.

It has been interesting to discover, as we dig new planting holes, that the soil in different parts of this garden has fared wildly differently in terms of moisture retention this year. As might be expected, the ground at the top on the garden is much drier than that at the bottom, which is also better shaded, as well as being at the bottom of a slope. But the soil at the very top of the ground is really very hard and lifeless, and we’ve had to work in several barrow loads of our own garden compost before we could feel it safe to put precious new plants in there. The summer drought has had a much wider ranging impact on the garden than simply making water less available to plants; it has meant that the creatures and microbes of the soil have also failed to thrive, and the scarcity of these tiny members of our garden team is clearly going to hit the plants hard unless we can do something to help restore life to the worst affected parts of the garden. We don’t manage to make enough garden compost to be able to mulch the whole of the two acre site with it, and we have to resort to using municipal compost instead for the greater part of the garden. But our home made compost is so rich in the minute life forms upon which the garden ecosystem is based, that if we take a small amount and dilute it in water, and then water this onto an area of soil which has become depleted, some of those tiny microbes will be able to find their way into the soil and will be able to multiply there, spreading health and life in the happy garden.