18 Nov 2024 Volunteer News
Gardeners’ Newsletter - Winter 2024-25
Welcome to the ‘End of Season’ Gardeners’ Newsletter.
How did we get here so soon?
Change of seasons. Now late Autumn heralding an early winter giving us a moment to take stock. A sure sign we are heading for winter is its cooler mornings, low mists and much shorter evenings. Our garden is still a riot of colour with pink and burgundy sedum heads, colourful hydrangeas, wow dahlias, asters, heleniums, persicaria and salvias as well as our lovely annual beds still in flower and setting seeds which are spectacles in themselves too.
Many would say that’s it, the end of the season with gardening finishing for the year but actually there is a richness at this time of year – it’s quite special. These low light misty mornings, create magical vistas which are completely different to other times of the year. The variety in the leaves is a delight and the overall structure when you see the garden as a whole.
Whilst we have had a horrid year with the most unusual weather, our cold, very wet spring, then an arid midsummer where we were forever watering; I think we are lucky to enjoy our changing seasons still. But what is our weather norm now?
It is hard to know and even harder to prepare for when gardening and growing. Some say seasons all mingle into one, but, there is a definite mix and what a wonder to see our leaves take on a different hue. Our seed heads are developing into the most interesting shapes and forms. Once winter is upon us and flowers fade there is still form and outline to the garden which will continue to give us interest, right through until Spring.
Not forgetting, that we have winter flowering interest and scent in the garden. Already Mahonia Charity with her bright yellow flowers is emerging with a lovely gentle scent pervading our main herbaceous border. Soon to be flowering will be Sarcococca hookeriana (commonly known as Christmas Box) flowers from December onwards with pretty scented flowers followed by red and black berries. Winter flowering Jasmin with pretty fragrant flowers. Soon to follow the Hamamelis (Witch Hazel) with more amazing yellow fragrant flowers. Then Magnolia. Winter flowering honeysuckle and not forgetting Daphnes and our growing collection of hellebores plus so much more.
We have had some wonderful new gardeners joining us this year. Following Graham earlier in the year we welcomed Judy, Wendy, Terry and Christine, who have been wonderful new additions to our gardening team.
So what has been going on in the garden?
We had an unexpected visit from the Duchess of York - a few of us had the opportunity of meeting with her and showing her around the garden. She was very impressed. She loved our roses and thought our Potager, whilst still in its early stages was amazing. She is an amazing individual; extremely caring and very hard working. We agreed after this visit we would increase the roses we have in the garden and try to include some royal roses. To date, we have been unsuccessful in finding ‘The Duchess of York Rose’, ‘Rosa Eugenie’, and ‘Rosa Beatrice’. Tim Grace is on the case though - watch this space!
I suppose we would all agree the outstanding creation of the Potager has been a huge achievement. (We have only just learned that Morrisons very kindly donated a very generous sum towards this project). A wonderful sight in Spring and early Summer producing much in the way of fruit and flowers, potatoes, peas, kohl rabbi and beans. Very sadly, we had uninvited visitors to the garden!! Badgers, Mink, Deer - our chard, beetroot, and lettuces were demolished overnight. It was so disappointing as so much work and expense had gone into what we had hoped would have provided the chef with a wonderful array of organic produce. Alas, we think the deer snapped off the roses; maybe the mink got to the Ducks – this is the first year we have not seen any ducklings!!
The other menace slugs demolished many of our vegetable seedlings, and our emerging dahlias and delphiniums! So perhaps not the best start to the production of vegetables and salads, thankfully, the flower seedlings that the slugs left alone provided us with wondrously floriferous displays!!
In other news...
Our cutting patch, an experimentation in ‘no dig’ gardening, produced and continues to produce, wonderful displays of annual flowers much of which were seed sown directly into the soil, this is the first time we have tried this – I would say it was very successful, flowers were later than usual, nevertheless, they put on a good show.
Our homegrown seedlings of cosmos and ammi were wonderful as usual. Sadly the snapdragons seemed to show signs of rust and were not such a brilliant display this time. The sweet peas, delphiniums, dahlias and chrysanthemums have created some wonderful displays, and we’ll soon be lifting and storing the dahlias and saving the chrysanthemums and their cuttings.
We were very lucky to have been gifted a very generous donation of Delphiniums from a gentleman who houses the Northern National Collection.
A few of the gardeners went along to see the collection and got some firsthand experience of how to propagate and manage them. We were also lucky to have been gifted some dahlias and chrysanthemums from the Horbury Allotment group.
We are fortunate to have these local relationships and are extremely grateful that some of us happily donate plants from our own gardens too, which adds to the ever-increasing interest in the garden.
This year in the garden various activities and projects were carried out as normal: we saw the first dredging of the pond yielding an abundance of large cobbles which we now need to get rid of, one idea being we clean bag them and sell for an attractive price compared to their garden centres cost! Our log bagging and selling had some success raising a reasonable cash for The Kirkwood. Hopefully, we can continue with these fundraising ideas.
We will soon be emptying the planters adding bulbs and getting ready to introduce more interesting flora and fauna. We will be putting back in, some of the plants that were taken out when the original planters were demolished. We will have to see how they fare. We have been busily collecting seed from around the garden which we will hopefully be using around the garden next year.
As always, we aim to maintain a first class garden and always keep it as pristine as possible in our two morning visits a week. Our gardening teams work efficiently around the garden maintaining our busy borders and planters. We continue to introduce new varieties of plants and bulbs hopefully adding to more interest and encouraging biodiversity.
We are also currently searching for more autumnal and late season flowering, for example: Asters/Michaelmas daisies now known as Symphyptrichums!!! (Always Asters to me!!). We have found a nursery that specialises in unusual asters and they have offered to grow on for us at an affordable price. Let’s hope we will have these for next autumn.
This year we have had the highest number of external corporate volunteers; there seem to be more and more companies offering their employees ‘volunteer’ days within charitable businesses.
We have been fortunate to have had such hard working teams, so much so, that it encouraged us to bring a project forward as we had such good help. We are improving the rear staff car parking area which has been a tad overlooked this year. There is not a lot of interest, certainly not much colour – let’s just say next year you will be able to see where we have been!!! (currently, work in progress).
Whilst getting rid of the waste from here it was clear the sort of things we were digging out, for example, sedges, were not going to rot down easily. We have created areas in the woodland behind our boundary, an area we believe we have the use of, where sedges and the like can rot down and add to biodiversity. Whilst creating this area and in preparation of some welcome tree felling our wonderful ‘hands-on’ technical maintenance gardeners have built a gate that promotes easy access to this area.
Now we are tidying and improving this space our plan had always been to build some dead hedges behind our terrace of compost bays and have log piles dotted about. We are discussing including some Duke of Edinburgh students on board plus some of the corporate volunteers to assist in this matter. In principle, it has been agreed. Something to discuss and be ready for next year. (Obviously, health and safety issues/risk assessment etc to be done).
So all that is left to do is tuck up the borders for their winter snooze with our lovely homemade completely organic lush compost and leaf mould leaving the borders looking pristine until our return in the new year.
Best wishes and have a lovely Christmas time.
Linda Roberts.