General tidy up in the garden. I remember walking through Martin Crawford's two acre forest garden in Devon a couple of years ago. One of our group asked him how much maintenance it required. He replied that he walked through it with a pair of shears several times a year.

 Cyclamen hederifolium is a gem for shady spots and woodland gardens. It blooms late in summer and into autumn, one of the very few plants that will flower in shade at this time of year. The flowers are pure white or exquisite pink. I notice that bees seem to favour the pinks but ignore the whites.  

 And it's tough; the driest of dry shade will not defeat it. Marbled ivy-like leaves appear after flowering. It seeds and spreads readily to the extent that the foliage makes for a useful groundcover on otherwise bare soil.   

 Tools of the trade. Bought one of these for the allotment. This style of spade is sold as a trenching tool but I find it the ideal implement for planting. Pierces hard ground easily and makes a nice pot sized hole deep as you like.

 Starting seeds off in pots is one way to do it. Alternatively "direct sow" i.e. straight into the ground where the plants are intended to grow as I did today. The white flowered form of Honesty (Lunaria annua alba) is generally biennial but sometimes flowers the year after sowing. Hedge Woundwort (Stachys sylvatica) is perennial but grows fast and can be in flower the following year.

 Some gardening books recommend propagating seeds in spring as the most reliable approach. Fair point but if a plant sheds seed in autumn then an autumn sowing is simply following nature's course.    

 

 

 New plants from old, part two. At the top of the table is Iris foetidissima var. citrina which is the rather rare yellow flowered form of the Stinking Iris aka Gladwyn Iris. Below that is Greater Periwinkle (Vinca major), a common enough garden plant but I noticed this one has flowers of a particularly lovely hue. In fact the straight species is not much seen in garden centres these days as they generally stock several cultivars which I don't much care for.

 Both are from the garden of the house I grew up in where my father still lives. He tells me the Periwinkle was all over the back end of the garden when the house was purchased so it's certainly persistent. The Iris has probably been around for a long time too though I only noticed it to be the citrina variation earlier this year.

 Both are simple plants to divide. Iris foetidissima forms a steadily increasing clump of rhizomes; V. major spreads by trailing stems which root to create new shoots.

 

 Sometimes the easiest way to acquire new plants is to dig up old ones. Oriental Borage (Trachystemon orientalis) comes into leaf in early spring with Borage-like flowers. It spreads by rooty rhizomes which can be lifted from the soil and replanted elsewhere. There's no need to be too gentle about it, this is a very tough plant.

 

 

The flowers are much visited by bees and the heart-shaped leaves get bigger and bigger as the season progresses. A groundcovering plant that grows vigorously in shade, even dry shade. 

Tidying up on the allotment, taking stock and making plans...

 Is Ivy (Hedera helix) the single most important plant for wildlife? It must be a contender. For one thing it is one of the most widespread of wild plants. A thicket of Ivy provides shelter for hibernating insects in winter and nesting birds and small mammals in spring, protection all year round in fact for a host of living things. Food too in the form of berries for birds.

 And crucially Ivy is the last big hit of pollen and nectar as autumn draws in. It attracts a panoply of pollinators: bees, butterflies. hoverflies, wasps etc. For that reason I never cut Ivy back till late in the year after flowering has finished. As late as November I have seen Ivy buzzing with honey bees if the weather is still mild and sunny. 

 

 

 I'm pretty sure this is an Ivy Bee, a species which came to these shores as recently as 2001. We are used to hearing about declining bee populations but this is one that's thriving and expanding. Colletes hederae emerges late in the year when Ivy comes into flower. Perhaps that is why this newcomer has been so successful? Many traditional habitats for pollinators have been lost but there is no shortage of Ivy.

 

Postscript Just read that Ivy in flower attracts in the region of 140 different insects. 

 Most bulbs multiply both by shedding seed and producing offsets from the bulb itself. Case in point this Ramson (Allium ursinum) was one bulb when I planted it and has now become two. 

 Ramsons spread very vigorously when the conditions are right; damp deciduous shade is their natural habitat as seen here in a Wiltshire wood. The air reeks of garlic when they carpet the ground like this!     

 

 Microclimates offer useful possibilities for the gardener. I haven't posted a photograph of this particular view of the garden before. The back bedroom was occupied by a flatmate who moved out recently. Standing in the empty room I found myself looking out at a familiar locale from a different vantage point.   

 The microclimate in question is a corridor of sorts that runs between my house and the next one divided by a fence. A shard of sunlight shines down it for a short while each morning but the border is shady most of the time and damp. For that reasons ferns are well suited to this position. I also planted Ramsons aka Wild Garlic (Allium ursinum) which require a moist soil in shade. A patch of London Pride (Saxifraga x urbium) tolerates the low light levels and likes the moisture. Enchanter's Nightshade (Circaea luetiana) has self-seeded and Tellima grandiflora grows out of the cracks in the paving stones, a plant that does well elsewhere in the garden. It likes a shady spot but seems to be at home in both damp and dry shade.

 Like many gardens this one contains a number of microclimates i.e. small scale variations in growing conditions. Identifying a microclimate and working with the conditions is far more productive than working against them. Right plant, right place!     

 

 

"And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease"

 

From 'To Autumn', John Keats

 Windfall apples from the tree next door. The main bough hangs over the fence and most of the crop is on this side! I plucked one of the few apples still hanging on a branch for breakfast. It was delicious -sweetly sour- and a bit knobbly. Knobbly apples are always the tastiest.  

 Cardboard is great stuff, no need to use plastic landscaping fabric. I cleared this bed of ivy and I'm layering it with cardboard till I get round to planting it out. Cardboard is surprisingly long lasting but porous and biodegradable- eventually. A layer or two will suppress unwanted growth for months before it disintegrates. I won't be doing any planting here till spring and there will probably still be wet and decaying cardboard on the ground. At which point I'll simply dig through it with the spade.
 This approach can amplified by 'lasagne mulching' for soil improvement. Several years ago I joined in with a group of volunteers to mulch a large area at a community garden. A base layer of cardboard was covered with several inches of well rotted horse manure followed by another layer of cardboard topped off with a several inches of woodchip. Six months later the area was relatively weed free with a good friable topsoil where the various "ingredients" had merged into the ground.

 To my eye Narcissus 'Thalia' is the most graceful of all the daffodil cultivars. Spring flowering of course but I recently bought a couple of dozen bulbs to add to the ones I planted a number of years ago hence the photo.
 'Thalia' is related to Narcissus triandus which grows wild in Portugal, Spain and France. It is generally described as a hybrid but I can't find any reference to what N. triandus was crossed with or by whom to create 'Thalia'. Perhaps it was a form selected from the wild? Similarly there are varying accounts of when it appeared. Some sources say 1916 in Holland, others describe it as a favourite of Victorian gardeners, one source dates it to 1610.
 Narcissus 'Thalia' is an old, possibly ancient variety whose origins are lost in the mists of time.

 Nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) have run rampant this year on the allotment. I sowed a couple of dozen under the bean canes last year as a form of companion planting. They self-seeded resulting in a dense mass of foliage extending beyond the bed itself.
 I lifted the carpet of them at one end and they have even shaded out the couch grass. It will make a comeback I'm sure when the Nasturtiums are killed off by the first frosts but T. majus makes a good groundcover when conditions suit. I was under the impression that they have been very leafy but short on flowers. In fact there is a lot of seed on the ground beneath the foliage so the flowering must have been more prolific than I thought.

 Echium pininana is naturalising in warmer parts of the UK, including London. This exotic arrival from the Canary Islands is often referred to as Giant Echium or Tree Echium, both names are apt.
 There is a colony of them in St. James' Park in the heart of central London. The photo above demonstrates the triennial lifespan of E. pininana. The bright green leaves at the front are the first year's growth when the seedling puts on a rosette of leaves. The darker green leaves behind are plants in their second year with a thick stem that grows to about a metre tall. In their third year a tall spike forms covered in thousands of blue flowers in early summer. The plant then withers and dies shedding masses of seed as it does so. The shriveling stalks are what remains by this point in the year.
 The photo below shows the same locale when the Echiums are in flower, it's quite a sight:

 I have wondered whether the ones in St. James' Park are a chance arrival that has spread or an introduction. Walking in the park yesterday I spotted one of the park gardeners doing some watering. I asked him this question and in fact it was he who first planted them! He started with half a dozen and they have self-seeded to the point where there are many. Well done that man!

 There is an enormous fig tree in the back garden at my father's house in Hertfordshire. By the end of summer it is laden with figs which have always been too green and hard to eat. Until now.
 This year it has produced a crop that's ripe and ready to be plucked. Actually birds are doing most of the plucking but that's no bad thing. For example, a gaggle of five or six Thrushes regularly descends on the tree to peck furiously at the fleshiest figs they can find.
 Thrushes were one of the commonest birds in this garden when I was a child but they seem to have been few and far between in recent times. Happy to seem them tucking in. 

 Autumn is the season of seeds as well as "mellow fruitfulness" (see last entry). Keats was picturing vines and apple trees. In the botanical sense the term 'fruit' refers to the organ of a flowering plant that contains seeds be it edible or not.
 The photograph above shows the fluffy seed heads of a once prickly thistle. There is an old saying that "One year's seeds is seven year's weeds". True enough I suppose but here is another saying which I have just made up: "One year's seeds is seven year's wildflowers".  

 We are entering the "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" as Keats called it in his poem To Autumn. Some lovely watery sunshine in recent days though quite a lot of actual water in the form of rain. Keats doesn't mention the rain.

 Here is something I like. Firstly it's a healthy specimen of the Stinking Hellebore (Hellebore foetidus). Secondly it's in a biodegradable coir pot- you plant it pot and all- as grown by The Hairy Pot Company who have developed a good range of perennials in recent years. Thirdly I bought it at the Nunhead Gardener which is a short walk from where I live. Some enterprising folk took on what the Americans would call a "vacant lot" and started a garden centre.
 It's not huge but it's well stocked so now I can buy decent plants close to home. What's not to like?