Perhaps Autumn Is Where the Gardening Year Begins

Perhaps Autumn Is Where the Gardening Year Begins

Spring is the season gardeners are expected to become excited about. The first warmer days arrive, the garden centres fill with fresh plants and suddenly we're looking at every empty patch of soil as an opportunity. There's a sense of the whole gardening year opening in front of us, even if the weather is still doing its best to convince us otherwise.

Autumn produces a rather different feeling. The days are shortening, leaves are beginning to turn and winter's waiting somewhere beyond it. Even those of us who enjoy autumn can feel the garden is winding down. We talk about putting it to bed, clearing up and preparing everything for the colder months ahead.

After the summer we've just experienced, I'm beginning to think we have this slightly back to front. Spring may be when much of the garden becomes visible again, but autumn is often when the next garden begins.

The difference between the two seasons may be as much psychological as horticultural. Spring leads us towards longer days, warmth and the promise of summer; autumn leads us towards darkness, cold and wet weather. It's understandable that one feels like an arrival and the other like a departure.

Not everyone can or should be persuaded to become excited about autumn. For some people, the darker part of the year is genuinely difficult. Gardening is closely tied to how we feel about the seasons, and a person who lives for light and warmth is unlikely to greet the first falling leaves as good news. Autumn can't be reduced to a pleasant collection of misty mornings, berries and beautifully coloured trees when, for somebody else, it marks the beginning of months spent feeling cold and confined indoors.

Yet the gardening year tells a more complicated story. Autumn contains endings, certainly, but it's also full of preparation, establishment and decisions about what happens next.

This is especially true after a difficult summer. Heat and drought expose a garden in ways a gentler season doesn't. We discover which areas lose moisture first, where afternoon sun is far stronger than we realised and which plants are only succeeding because we've been carrying water to them. Established plants often cope better than recent additions, while something we'd always considered dependable may suddenly reach its limit.

A difficult season strips away some of our assumptions. The plant label may have said full sun, but the plant itself has spent the summer disagreeing. A border we thought was reasonably moisture-retentive may have become hard and cracked. Shade that looked like a problem in spring may have proved to be one of the most valuable things in the garden once the temperature climbed. By autumn, we're not looking at the garden we imagined in spring — we're looking at the evidence.

That makes autumn a very good time to decide what needs changing. We can move something that's clearly been struggling in the wrong place, divide a successful plant to fill a gap or reconsider a part of the border that's never quite worked. We might plant a tree to create shade, add shrubs for structure or replace something we've lost — hopefully not automatically with another example of the same plant in precisely the same conditions. Spring encourages possibility; autumn gives us information.

There's also a practical reason why many of these changes belong naturally to autumn. For a large range of hardy trees, shrubs and perennials, the combination of warm soil, cooler air and more dependable moisture provides useful establishment conditions. A newly planted tree doesn't stop doing everything simply because its leaves have fallen — root activity can continue while the soil remains warm enough, allowing it to begin settling before the demands of the following growing season arrive.

A tree planted in spring may have only a short period in which to establish before it faces warmer weather and drying soil. In a hot year, it can move almost directly from the carefully managed conditions of a nursery pot into months of stress. Autumn planting doesn't remove the need for aftercare, but it can give the plant a head start. Current RHS guidance on planting trees and shrubs similarly notes that autumn and winter planting generally require less watering than planting during spring or summer.

That feels increasingly important. If hotter, drier summers are becoming a more regular part of gardening, planting immediately before one begins may no longer be the obvious choice. Giving roots the cooler months in which to begin establishing could make the difference between a plant that copes and one that spends its first summer permanently waiting for us to arrive with a watering can.

There are financial and environmental advantages as well. Autumn marks the beginning of the bare-root season for many deciduous trees, shrubs, roses and hedging plants. Bare-root plants are usually cheaper, lighter to transport and supplied without a plastic pot. They may look less exciting than a container-grown plant covered in leaves and flowers, but that rather unimpressive bundle of stems and roots can establish extremely well.

This may be one reason spring has come to dominate our gardening imagination. It's a much easier season in which to sell plants. Everything is growing, flowering and presenting its best self. We can see exactly what we're buying, and the garden centre feels full of immediate possibilities.

Autumn plants demand a little more imagination. A dormant bare-root tree doesn't create the same instant excitement as a container filled with flower. Bulbs are even more extreme: we buy what appears to be a bag of brown objects, bury them in cold soil and trust that something wonderful will eventually happen. Autumn gardening requires faith in what can't yet be seen.

There's something rather fitting about that, because much of the important activity following autumn planting happens out of sight. We're used to judging gardening by visible growth — the new leaves, flowers and height gained above ground — but establishment begins with roots. The garden may appear to be slowing while the foundations of the following year are being laid beneath the soil.

Bulb planting works on the same principle. Ordering bulbs is generally the enjoyable part; putting hundreds of them into heavy or stony ground can be considerably less romantic. Yet planting them is an act of confidence in another season — we're making a spring display at the point when spring feels furthest away.

Autumn also allows us to make more of what's already succeeded. Many herbaceous perennials can be divided during spring or autumn, depending on the plant and the conditions. A clump that's grown strongly can become several plants, filling spaces without sending us back to the garden centre. It's one of the pleasures of an established garden: the plants that have proved themselves begin providing the material for its next stage.

This doesn't mean every plant should be moved or divided as soon as September appears on the calendar. The condition of the ground matters more than the name of the month. In some gardens, a few showers will soften the soil enough to make planting possible; elsewhere, the rain will barely penetrate a surface baked hard by weeks of drought. Trying to force a fork into that ground may damage the soil, the tool and possibly the gardener, without giving the plant a particularly welcoming home.

Too much rain creates the opposite problem. Heavy clay can change rapidly from something resembling concrete into sticky, waterlogged ground that shouldn't be worked at all. Plants that dislike winter wet may be better planted in spring, giving them time to establish before facing their first cold, saturated season. The RHS advises delaying planting on particularly heavy clay until late winter or early spring, where dormant roots would otherwise be vulnerable to waterlogging.

The phrase "autumn is the best planting time" therefore needs the same qualification as most gardening advice: it depends on the plant, the soil, the climate and the conditions at that moment.

In the far north, autumn may already be well established while southern gardens remain full of dahlias, salvias and late colour. One gardener may be preparing Mediterranean herbs for months of cold rain and Atlantic winds while another is still waiting for the first meaningful shower to soften the soil. The calendar gives the season a name, but each garden reaches it in its own time.

That doesn't weaken the case for autumn — it makes observation part of autumn gardening. We wait until the soil is genuinely workable rather than planting because a date or an advertisement has told us to. We check below the surface instead of assuming one wet afternoon has repaired a summer's drought. And we look at the plant before deciding whether it should be cut back, moved or left alone.

There's a temptation after a difficult summer to become ruthless. A plant has looked dreadful for several months, so out it comes. Sometimes that's the correct decision — a plant that requires constant rescue or repeatedly collapses in the same conditions may no longer deserve its place.

Other plants need more time before judgement is passed. Scorched foliage doesn't necessarily mean dead roots, and a perennial that disappeared during drought may return once conditions improve. Autumn should be a season of considered editing rather than angry clearance — the garden has given us evidence, but we still need to interpret it.

Nor should excitement about autumn become another excuse to fill every space. Some gaps are useful. They give neighbouring plants room, create planting opportunities for bulbs and allow the border to change naturally. A garden doesn't need to be made permanently full in order to feel complete.

The comments on the original post also reminded me that autumn offers more than a convenient planting window. Seed heads, mosses, berries and changing foliage bring a different kind of beauty. Birds' nests, hidden all summer inside dense shrubs, become visible after the leaves fall. The structure of the garden slowly emerges from beneath its summer covering.

Berries deserve more consideration in our planting choices. They extend colour beyond flowering and provide food for birds through the colder months. A shrub laden with hips, haws or berries may contribute more to an autumn and winter garden than one chosen entirely for a brief display of spring flowers.

This changes how we judge whether a plant's had a successful year. Flowers are only one part of its contribution. A plant may feed insects in spring, provide shade and shelter during summer, carry berries in autumn and offer somewhere for birds to hide in winter. The further we look beyond peak flowering, the less autumn feels like the garden losing everything that mattered.

There's work to do, of course. Mulching, moving, planting, dividing, gathering seed and dealing with whatever the summer's left behind can make autumn one of the busiest parts of the year. Yet the work feels different from the constant watering and crisis management of a difficult summer — cooler air and workable soil can make gardening pleasurable again, rather than something done purely to keep plants alive.

Planning returns as well. A bulb catalogue, an empty notebook page or the prospect of a new tree can restore some of the optimism lost during the summer. The garden is no longer something we're trying to preserve exactly as it was. It becomes changeable again.

That may be the real reason to become more excited about autumn — not because we must learn to prefer falling leaves to spring flowers, or pretend winter's approach feels welcome to everyone, but because autumn gives us a chance to respond.

We've watched the garden through heat, drought, rain, recovery and failure, and we know more about it than we did in spring. We've seen which plants earned their place and which parts of the garden need another idea.

Spring is when the results begin to show. Autumn is when many of those results are decided.

Maybe the gardening year doesn't begin with the first shoots appearing above the soil. Maybe it begins a few months earlier, with a gardener standing in cooler air, looking at what the previous season has taught them and deciding what to do next.

Happy Gardening.
Marcus

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