January

I confess, I am writing this in my study, looking over the garden. I am not in the garden. Although I am utterly delighted that the rain has finally stopped, it is bitterly cold. Too cold for me, and fingers and toes crossed too cold for the slugs. I do find a good deep frost so incredibly cleansing.

I do have a day in the diary for gardening tomorrow. Thursday is my day for doing all the seasonal jobs together - at this time of year, I find it so much easier to dedicate a whole day to wrapping up and then getting muddy. Tomorrow is a biodynamic fruit day, which is perfect, because I was very much hoping to move some apple trees, and take some hardwood cuttings of a pink currant that has been looking quite unhappy for a while.

However, being an inveterate anthophile (a flower lover, and yes, I do wish I’d known that word before I decided to call Gather Gather) I have my eye on Sunday. One long flower day from late dawn to early dusk.

Some of these jobs might need to wait until the ground has thawed a bit, but have a look at what the weather is doing where you are, and see whether you can get a spade into the soil, and make you own decision about how to fit these jobs into the rest of this darkest month.

Bare rooteds

Plant bare-root roses, shrubs, hedging and trees.

Bare root plants are plants dug up from the nursery field when they are dormant in the winter, and sent out in the post to you just as they are. No pots, no soil, just plants. Lots of advantages to this, including the lightness of packaging and posting. Bare root plants take really well when they are put into the ground. Think about when you put a potted plant into a hole; there is a boundary between old and new, between the hole and the compost. Roots can hit this and turn back (especially if you have clay), water can sit in the hole, the general shock of putting a mollycoddled, potted plant into the harsh realities of my field can do for it before spring. Bare root plants are tough. Like really tough. And they are cheaper too. All the benefits.

I am adding lime espaliers to the front wall of Malus Farm and I’ll be honest, I am not sure when I am going to be able to plant them as the wall itself might need to be completely rebuilt, but I know that I am better off ordering them now, in bare root season, and then growing them on in pots. Dormant twiggy trees sold. bare root are a fraction of a price of sharp green plants in full leaf.

In addition to lime trees, I am also wondering about rejuvenating my rose collection. Many of my plants are over ten years old now and they’ve been moved a few times. My experience is that climbers last forever, but the more precious hybrid teas do exhaust themselves.

This is also my excuse to finally get hold of a ‘Dannahue’. It was the hit of the David Austin stand at Chelsea and I have it on good, if secret, authority, that this is a replacement for the much lamented ‘Jude the Obscure’. I am going to buy mine now because I know they have been very popular and I don’t want to go up to the wire (season ends in April) and find that I’ve missed out. However, if you get the DA catalogue, they do tend to start throwing around discount codes at the end of March. If I get one, I’ll share it with you.

‘Dannahue’ from David Austin

Recommended sources for bare rooted plants:

• David Austin for roses always. Say what you like about me, but once my heart is given, I am faithful.

• Chris Bowers & Ken Muir for fruit trees, or Pennard if you can get hold of them. Look out for open days or them being at shows and events.

• Ashridge Trees for hedging and native trees. They also do apples and other fruit trees.

Cuttings

I spent a lot of money on shrubs last year, mostly encouraged/led astray by Rachel of Green & Gorgeous and her beautiful book.

If the weather warms up towards the end of next week, I will be doing absolutely tonnes of cuttings. Luckily, I have written a whole blog post about that already, so all I have to do this week is to buy some multi-purpose peat free compost and check that I still have some grit.

Hellebores

If you have hellebores already, go and have a look at them. They might surprise you about how far along they are. An early white Christmas rose caught me completely by surprise by being fully in flower on New Year’s Day.

My bigger hellebores are showing signs of having a bumper year - again. They are planted around the back of the greenhouse and I think it casts just the right amount of shade. Now is the time to cut the foliage right back. If any of it has even the slightest amount of black on it, burn or send to the council waste, do not compost at home. Leaf spot disease is a terrible problem for hellebores but a little goes a long way in keeping it in check.

if you don’t have hellebores or, like me, you don’t have enough, now is the time to shop. Not so much because they like being planted in flower (as snowdrops do) but because hellebores are so subtle in their markings and colour tones that it is so much better to buy them in flower, where you can see them with your own eyes. I have tried for years to do justice to a slate hellebore with a camera and have yet to manage it.

Most UK garden centres will have Harvington hellebores, but do a bit of googling and asking around to see if there are any specialist nurseries around you that might have some interesting varieties. Hellebores are notoriously promiscuous and they create new forms quite happily.

I don’t want to gloat, but I am thrilled to find that my new piece of garden has just two flowers in it, and one of them is Helleborus argutifolius. The other is rose of Sharon (Hypericum), that stalwart of supermarket carparks. You can’t win them all.

This is a misleading picture - it is too soon to cut them.

Snowdrops

Now is the time to seek out your closest snowdrop colony and, if they are associated with a nursery, get your hands on some to plant. I have expressed my sadness that East Lambrook may never open again, but I am lucky enough to have Broadleigh Gardens on my doorstep too, which are also snowdrop aficionados. Snowdrops are unique (if you know of another one, tell me) in that they are planted in flower. Something to do with how much they don’t like drying out. So now is your moment to seek them out, admire them, succumb to buying far more than you intended and plant them. Then you will forget about them until next January and give thanks that your past self gave you such a gift.

Moving established plants

Almost all plants do best if moved when they are dormant.

PRUNING ROSEs

If you have roses, and you haven’t pruned them already, now is the time. This recent cold weather has done me a favour. My roses often have a flower or two on them all the way through the winter and, although my secateurs itch, I can’t bring myself to cut them right back. However, two hard frosts and they are in tatters. I am going in. If you have a waxed jacket, put it on. I always start in a thick, winter woolly jumper and spend the first twenty minutes cursing and unhooking myself. I remember a trial at Wisley where they compared a bed of roses pruned carefully and intricately by a highly skilled horticulturalist, and one that they ran a hedge-trimmer over. They fared pretty much the same. However, where’s the satisfaction in that?  

Sow sweet peas

Do I say this every month? I think so. But that’s because they are the most forgiving of all flower.

Everything you need to know here.  

That’s pretty much it. Eat, drink, hibernate.