Senescence

Senescence and petrichor, two words often heard from gardeners and nature lovers. The former describing the loss of a cell’s power to divide and grow, or a slow slide into decay, the latter used for the unique smell of rain on dry, sun-warmed ground. How things change in our turbulent times. I heard petrichor being bandied around on a morning radio news show last week, and senescence is cropping up with fearsome regularity as journalists describe the rapid (and potentially vastly profitable) advances in slowing the ageing process in human cells. It had been so mild while I was away in October/November that rainfall when I returned had still a trace of petrichor, and new growth was springing up everywhere. Now, however, we have been at -3/-4 for three days, topped today with a sprinkle of snow, so I will stick with seasonal senescence of the outdoors variety. Prized these days are robust herbaceous plants whose seed heads stand throughout the winter, bringing dual benefits of shelter for small creatures and winter structure in the garden. An old school gardener can often be identified by their grabbing of secateurs and shears round about November, ready to clip and trim brown stalks and fluffy seed heads - “tidying up the garden”, their favourite phrase. Now we have learned to value that dry russet, grey and black tangle: ladybirds and amphibians, caterpillars and beetles, overwintering queen bees, all grateful for some shelter. The soil too benefits from that slowly decaying matter. Dry stems and seed heads can of course get knocked around by strong winds, heavy rain, even snow, but as long as you are prepared to live with something which does not look like a shorn municipal park c.1988, you can do winter structure. With an enormous lime tree and oak tree metres from our house, we also collect fallen leaves from paths to make leaf mould (and to avoid iced path mishaps) but closer to the large beds, I just push the leaves onto the soil to rot down. I also leave seedheads because it often means new babies come the spring. Nature generally has a way of providing, if you allow her.

It was an odd sound from the old drover’s pond at the gate a few days ago, like the click-clack of small dogs on hard floors, or the irregular smattering of rain on windows. Leaving the bird feeders, I wandered over and realised it was the noise of birch leaves falling on the pond. Not into the pond, but onto the ice. Barely any wind, just iron-dry freezing for the third day in a row and so, finally, and very gracefully, the birches were giving up their leaves. It had felt more like autumn than winter for weeks: leaves still hanging onto oak, lime, birch and maple, but at last the mercury dips low enough to provoke separation. A shimmer of butter yellow eddies down and skits across the ice which now locks the pond from end to end. This, the pond which on my return last month was still parched, dependent as it is on rain run-off from the neighbouring fields. A week of torrential rain finally arrived, and now this hoarfrost, and suddenly we have a little Scandi scene all of our own.

Last week was thick fog and skies down to our shoulders - now it is all sparkle and crystal on grass and leaves, with that brief winter window of perfect light. It is has been full moon this week, with the unpolluted Herefordshire skies pinpoint clear and the whole countryside bathed in that ice white light. Extraordinary beauty, and a welcome return of winter temperatures after a year of confusion for plant thermostats. Our camera trap in the wood picks up the fox jogging along the path, that easy gangster gait making him almost noiseless. Blackbirds skirmish ceaselessly over spills from the bird feeders, and the thrushes have cleaned all trace of windfall apples. As soon as the suet goes up, the greater spotted woodpeckers reappear, brazen enough to come close to the kitchen feeders too, and aggressive enough to chide blue tits, great tits and coal tits away. The nuthatches too, for all their elegant beauty, are feisty feeders, scolding any other birds who come close.

Prior to this freeze, I had started a redesign of the terrace beds, an extensive piece of work entailing lifting, transposing, and dividing large sections of the planting either side of the long path. Both sides had lost their balance, leaving us with too much growth on one side and not enough on the other. Additionally on the west side, I now had a sea of almost uninterrupted yellow, from rampaging phlomis (pale yellow) down into an ever expanding mass of very happy rudbeckias (golden yellow) into self sown briza plus giant stipa (grass gold). No sign any more of the countless alliums that had started life in there in 2020 as the late spring contrast, and not enough heft from dahlias and asters struggling to inject some depth and purple power in the midst of this sunny sea. Salvia “Amistad”, my trusted fallback, sulked through the heatwave of this summer, and only began flowering late in October - beautiful as always, but a little after the event in terms of September border colour. The phlomis - Jerusalem sage - are marvellous plants: thick diamond-shaped bases of felted leaves, pretty much evergreen, followed in spring by these amazing spikes of flower crowns, reminiscent of the Berlin Funkturm.

They are thugs though, expanding inexorably with deep root systems which burrow and reach well beyond the plants’ outline. But with huge borders to fill, thugs can be very useful, and so it was that nearly half the phlomis were heaved out and moved to the other side of the terrace, thereby balancing too much purple and hot pink. This in turn will allow the asters to be divided and redistributed into the higher, level part of the bed- and simply to breathe - and next to the giant stipa there is now a new colony of recently divided coppery red heleniums. Fifteen plants become thirty, and any qualms about slicing through your precious plants with a sharp spade should be quelled by the knowledge that division prolongs the life of many border favourites, preventing slow death by congestion. The crocosmia have also been lifted. So many of them, but scattered and in parts just squashed by more vigorous neighbours, so it was time to regroup in order for their beautiful curving foliage and those blazing scarlet flowers to be displayed to proper effect, close to the coppers and golds of the west bed. They too have doubled and tripled in size, so I have prised apart the knobbly corms and now have two crates awaiting new locations - once I can get a spade back in the ground.