It has definitely felt more autumnal in the garden over the last few days with temperatures dropping noticeably from the previous weeks warmer weather. But that didn’t stop the garden team - joined this week by intern Josh from Pembroke College and Will who is beginning his horticultural journey.
We have begun one of our larger projects scheduled for this autumn - the development of the Reservoir Garden. After the prolonged drought of last summer, followed by a wet winter, this area suffered some challenges that we are now hoping to rectify. We lost some plants here, and others, like forget-me-nots and poppies, took advantage to fill the empty spaces.
Although they looked lovely, they took over a little and crowded out some of the more interesting plants we wanted to showcase. So when they finished flowering they were removed and we sowed Phacelia into the open ground to keep it weed free and filled with plants until autumn. Now our job is to remove them to clear the borders so we can assess the remaining plants. We’ll decide which ones are working well, if we want to move any to other areas and importantly which new, more drought tolerant plants we can now add into the border.
We also received training ahead of starting our plant audit. We want to document every single plant in the garden and bring our plant list up to date. This list will help us to identify plants we can propagate for the nursery, plants which may need replacing and plants we have in the stock beds we may want to grow in garden. It’s a big task but will be so worthwhile and a great opportunity to learn more plants.
Our Beth Chatto intern Hannah also helped set up this weeks plant ident. Be sure to stop by and check out what’s looking good in the garden now.
Read on: What's still in flower in October?
Written by Gardener Scott
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