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It’s amazing to see how much difference some sunshine makes to the garden in autumn. After days of smothering grey, we suddenly have an airiness and brightness that brings out the best in the leaves that are turning yellow and gold. For a while, the outdoors feels welcoming again, and thoughts of the approach of winter can be set aside.
There is still some warmth in the sun, enough to entice me outside to work in the garden. This year I have been making lots of changes to the planting here. New plants have gone in and others moved to places where they will grow better or look more at home with their neighbours. (If only moving plants was as easy as moving furniture!)
As they become dormant for winter, plants can be moved to more suitable sites. Theoretically, I have plenty of time to get it all done before early spring, but it would be good to get it finished before the weather gets really cold or wet. So these sunny days have been ideal. At the same time, the low sunlight is reminding me to think about the effects of sunlight streaming through foliage and to look for ways to take advantage of it. It is, after all, primarily a photographer’s garden!
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In gardening, it often feels as if there is a pause while you wait for something to happen. Waiting for the right time to sow seeds, to see buds open, or to pick your harvest of fruit or vegetables. This week I’m waiting (and hoping) for the grey sky to clear and let a little sunlight through to the autumn leaves. They need that gleam of light to pick out their details and bring their images alive when I photograph them.
I’m waiting for the first frost of the year too… 🍂
Autumn leaf of Elder (Sambucus ‘Black Lace’), photographed on a frosty morning a couple of years ago.
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Last year I created a small bog garden here to make it easier to grow moisture-loving plants. For inspiration beforehand, I went to see a bog garden at East Bergholt Place. This is a large garden and arboretum which also has a plant centre (‘The Place for Plants’). Although my own bog garden is tiny – just five foot in diameter – I reckoned that being able to see what was growing happily in a large and well-established bog garden would be useful.
This garden is only about 16 miles away from our home, but the conditions are very different. The soil in it is naturally moist, due to there being a high water table and there is plenty of shade from large trees. (While walking around I noticed how damp the ground was underfoot. And being in the shade made it an excellent place to spend a very hot afternoon.)
The bog garden sits along the banks of a narrow, stone-edged stream that runs down from the area of a large formal pond. The damp soil here supports very lush growth which hides much of the watercourse.
A very small part of East Bergholt’s bog garden. You can just see the stone edges of the stream.
The structure of the bog garden at East Bergholt is obviously entirely different to my own one. Mine is entirely artificial, created by using an old tent groundsheet to trap moisture. (I first made holes in the groundsheet with a garden fork and then added a layer of stones and gravel to provide some drainage.) But I’m hoping that many of the plants that grow well at East Bergholt will be fine for my bog garden too.
I made the bog garden with the intention of providing suitable conditions for astilbes and Siberian irises. Other plants in it now include ragged robin (Lychnis flos cuculi, AKA Silene flos-cuculi), purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and a red hesperantha that had been struggling in too-dry soil elsewhere. (It is much happier now!)
Left: primulas, hostas and irises along the damp edges of the stream. Right: a view over the formal pond uphill from the bog garden.
It was reassuring to see the astilbes and Siberian irises growing well in the very damp soil at East Bergholt. There were lots of candelabra primulas,which were in full flower on our visit in mid-May last year. From the photographs, you’ll see that there were also ferns and hostas and I spotted the blue flowers of camassia and the pretty leaves of Alchemilla mollis too.
There is one thing that is worrying me a little about having made a bog garden: what will happen if we get a lot of rain over a long period? There are drainage holes in the groundsheet I used to line it, but they may not allow water to escape quickly enough if there is too much. The danger then is that roots may rot. But that is something I will just have to look out for – and my fingers will certainly be crossed!
Although the bog garden at East Bergholt was the focus of my attention, we did take the time to see the rest of the garden and arboretum. There is a formal garden area beside the house with lawns surrounded by topiary and hedges, but I preferred the arboretum, with its beautiful trees and flowering shrubs. The wilder area of the ‘lower garden’, with naturalistic planting and a large, totally informal pond was delightful too. I’ll be happy to visit this garden again!
Candelabra primulas were the star of the show in May.
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Last year my husband and I joined other visitors on ‘The Great Garden Trail’. This is a summer-long event for which volunteers open their gardens to raise money for the St Elizabeth Hospice in Ipswich, Suffolk. Gardens of all sorts take part in the scheme, big and small, filled with exciting plants, or more modestly planted. Some of the gardens are the setting for interesting historic houses and occasionally there may be a village with many of its gardens open to explore.
Otley Hall turned out to be in the ‘modestly planted’ category. I would have been disappointed if I’d gone there just to see the gardens, but I also love Suffolk’s quaint medieval houses, so the visit was worthwhile.
I couldn’t help but stop and admire the massive chimney, which looks as if it was built to impress anyone approaching the door.
Built in the early sixteenth century, Otley Hall is said to be the oldest house in Suffolk to have remained ‘largely intact’, with some parts of the building added later in the same century. Timber-framed buildings from medieval times are a feature of Suffolk’s countryside and many of its towns and villages. They make you feel as if you could step back in history by just walking inside them. (But we didn’t go inside this one – it was only the garden that was open on our visit.)
In the garden itself, my attention was captured by the beautiful irises which were in full flower, especially the white iris above, with the little hints of colour, and the blue one below. (Our visit was at the end of May, a little too early for the many roses there to be in bloom.)
The main flower borders edged a croquet lawn, one of several lawns throughout the gardens. Other grassy areas featured a labyrinth, ‘The Mount’ – an artificial mound which allows views of the surrounding countryside, and an H-shaped canal. (The house still has a moat on one side too.)
Otley’s ten acres have a mix of both formal gardens and informal, more natural grounds. For example, near the house there is a small ‘knot garden’ with box hedging and herbs planted up in a classic Tudor-style design. Elsewhere there are woodlands and hedgerows, maintained to encourage wildlife and areas planted up with wildflowers.
Formal and informal, clockwise from top left: wisteria on an arch beside the house, abelia growing beside a lawn, irises along the wilder edges of the canal, a vetch in a wildflower area.
The combination of traditional and wilder areas gives an easy-going feel to a stroll around the gardens of Otley Hall. It’s not the best garden for a plantaholic to visit, but it does offer a pleasant afternoon with the opportunity to see a fine example of a medieval timber-framed house. (It has an excellent cafe too…coffee and cake is an important part of our garden visits!)
There’s a walk beside the moat which allows a glimpse of the back of the house.
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After a long spell of mild and rainy weather, we at last had some frost. Photographically, it was a bit disappointing because it was mostly on the lawn and shorter plants. The taller plants, such as the Stipa gigantea (golden oats) above, had very little frost. So there were not many opportunities for photography. The pictures you see here are from last year.
Despite the thin coating of frost, it has felt really cold this week. The ground is frozen hard and there is thick ice over the top of the pond and in containers of saved rainwater. Only the week before, I had been able to spend time doing some weeding in the garden – not a chance of that now!
For the sake of this blog, I’m glad that I took lots of photos during last winter’s heavy frosts. The weather can’t be taken for granted, so there’s no guarantee of having anything to photograph at this time of year. Luckily for me, when it is frosty, the most ordinary of things look a lot more interesting!
A blackberry leaf looks as if its edges have been dipped in sugar.
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During winter direct sunlight doesn’t penetrate along much of one side of the garden. Photographing plants in this area can be frustrating. Even if they have a good coating of frost, they don’t catch the sun to make that frost sparkle.
Taller plants, like those here, do get some sun for a very short while, so there may be just enough light to make photographing them worthwhile. The light changes very quickly at this time of year, so the opportunity doesn’t last long.
A climbing hydrangea is just tall enough to catch the light.
Happily, January brings a gradual increase in how far the sun reaches over the garden fences and tall shrubs, over time illuminating more of the smaller plants. By the time spring is here, the sun will be high enough to allow me to take photographs throughout the whole garden. That is a time I look forward to!
Meanwhile, it occurs to me that I should plan to place the plants that look good when frosted in places where they will catch a little sparkle of sun. (But not somewhere too sunny, otherwise the frost may melt before I get outside with my camera.) I may be developing my own style of garden planning – ‘hortus photographicus’, hehe!
A frosted Daucus (wild carrot) seed head lurks on the dark side of the garden.
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A guid new year to ane an a An mony may ye see, An during a the years to come, O happy may ye be. An may ye ne’er hae cause to mourn, To sigh or shed a tear; To ane an a baith great an sma A hearty guid New year.
A Guid New Year to Ane AnA
As in the words of this traditional Scottish song, I wish everyone a ‘guid new year’. May it bring you all the best of health and happiness. (I think most of the meanings of the Scots words are fairly clear, but just in case they aren’t: guid = good, ane = one, a = all, mony = many, baith = both, sma = small)
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who reads my blog and to say how much I appreciate your comments and the chance to chat a little. I hope that my small patch of the internet brings you some pleasure in the natural world. Here’s to 2024! 🌿
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I hope that this Christmas, whether you celebrate it or not, will bring you happiness and wellbeing. It has been a busy year for us, so a time of good cheer and a little bit of indulgence will be welcome. (We value quieter Christmases these days – they give a great feeling of peace and time to just relax.)
Despite my usual frosty photo for Christmas, it looks as if we’ll see no frost or snow over this year’s festive period. Christmas day is forecast to be sunny, so time outside in the garden is a possibility. But there will be no hoar-frost photos like this one taken last December…a rest for the camera maybe!
However you spend Christmas, I hope that it’s a good one. Merry Christmas! I wish you joy. 🎄
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Frost has an amazing ability to enhance the smallest of garden details. It takes very little to allow it to create a fleeting beauty. Anything can suddenly become attractive when encrusted by these tiny, white crystals of ice.
The last of the year’s flowers, dried-out seed heads, leaves, or slender grasses stilled by the cold air – all are made much more interesting to look at by a touch of frost. These are the leaves of Pulsatilla vulgaris (pasqueflower). In spring they are soft and hairy and a delight to stroke. By winter those hairs have disappeared, giving the curving shapes of the deeply-cut leaves more prominence. To my mind, the dead and frosted leaves suggest the look of a woodcut image or engraved stone.
As I’m writing this, the ground is still frozen. Tomorrow, though, is forecast to be milder and rainy, so the magic of the frost will be gone from the garden. These leaves won’t last long once the frost has finished with them, but will be left limp and probably rather translucent. The frost will have helped them along their path of decomposition and their eventual contribution to the richness of the garden soil. 🍂
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Winter is fast approaching us, with some heavy frosts already here. But it hasn’t arrived quickly enough for frost to catch the leaves of this elder (Sambucus ‘Black Lace’) this year. The leaves stayed on the shrub unusually late last year – right into December – and gave me the chance of this photograph during a hoar frost.
Hoar frost itself is unusual here. This was the first time I’d seen it in my garden and I made the most of my chance to take some photos of it. (Got a bit frozen though!) This year I’ll be on the lookout for it happening again.
I’d have been happier if this year’s frosts had held off for a little while because I still have a lot of work to catch up with in the garden. Weeks of rain have meant that the ground was much too wet for planting and needed a chance to dry out. Now the ground has dried out and I have plants I want to move. There are others in pots that are waiting to be planted out. But the ground is frozen! I will just have to wait a little longer. Right now, it seems like a very good idea to stay indoors and warm, perhaps just venturing out for a few more frosty photos… 🙂
Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature 