My Garden Journal for November

We can now share my garden journal for the month of November, when we are engulfed in signs of autumn. Hot coloured leaves carpet the ground, and are scattered onto shrubs and perennials. We collect these up and use the autumn leaves to create hedgehog shelters and hibernacula for them. Leaves also provide winter shelter and homes for many other mini creatures. Blackbirds soon realise this and forage amongst them for sustenance.

The first page regarding November was about leaves changing colour and falling. “November this year saw signs of Autumn creeping in, slowly giving us colourful changes. Trees and shrubs are responding to the weather in so many different ways. Some remain totally green, others just networks of bare branches, while the rest are at differing stages of changing colour and dropping leaves.”

Over the page a double page spread concerns itself with protecting our more delicate plants and the few flowers that appear in November.

I wrote,“I always dislike the time when all our succulents have to be taken into the greenhouse to protect them from the cold and wet of our winters. Jude manages to arrange them in an attractive way so they can be enjoyed every day. Firstly we clean and bubblewrap the whole of the greenhouse, put up extra shelving and create our indoor display.”

When looking at November’s flowers I noted that, “Every flower that opens this month seems so special and unexpected, so I took a wander around our front and back gardens to see what I can find.”

Onto the next page and I featured some of our fuschia and wrote,” We have a few fuschia plants flowering well outside in the garden, with several growing in containers so that we can move them into the greenhouse when frosts arrive. One hardy fuschia is growing in the ‘Prairie Garden’, F. magellanica which is still covered in flowers. We dislike the blousy ballerina like fuschia so we tend to grow species. They are far more delicate, with more interesting foliage including a glaucous leaved variety, F. ‘Silver Linings’. Some of the flowers are tiny, no more than a centimetre long. Many of these fuschias are smaller than their more gaudy cousins.”

A look at our November garden wildlife follows on next. Here I noted that, “Wildlife is so important to us in our garden and we feel honoured to be visited by such a large range of creatures. A special treat this month was regular visits by a pair of Goldcrests.”

“We have so many different spiders around the garden, the most conspicuous being the ‘Garden Spider’ with its subtle colours and beautiful markings. Early morning mist, fog and dew highlight the beauty of their webs.”

“There are over 600 different spiders in the UK, many very small and difficult to identify like the one in this photograph. It has beautiful markings and colouring. It may be an ‘Araneus diadematus?’ “

“The wasp nest in a sparrow nest box remained active until half way through November, which is very much later than expected.”

I then shared a painting of a pair Goldcrests that I painted decades ago.

I was looking closely at a little vase of flowers cut from our patch and was amazed at Geranium ‘Rosanne’, and I noted that, “When petals fall and colour disappears we are left with the other flower parts displayed just prior to fruit or seed pouches forming.”

The final page in my garden journal 2023 for November looks again at autumn colour but with a different slant. I wrote, “Think of autumn colours and usually we look to trees but we get almost as much beauty from our grasses. By choosing the right set of grasses you can watch as they turn very slowly from greens to yellows and oranges.” A set of seven photos illustrates this.