My Garden Journal 2024 September

Some people think that September is the first month of autumn, but I like to tag it onto summer in the hope that we get an ‘Indian Summer’ which is always such a treat.

Sadly September this year failed us in that regard, as it was colder and wetter than usual. But there was still plenty to look at in our garden.

There were plenty of jobs to do too! We decided to revamp Arabella’s Garden, the garden we made for our granddaughter. We began by clearing the areas we had become uncomfortable with. Once clear we improved the soil with compost and set the plants out where we wanted them to go to check the layout looked okay.

The key plant was a bright greenish-yellow grass, a hakonochloa. We added some ajuga with variegated foliage and a muckendenia. The idea was to keep the overall planting height quite low, so other plants would sit among the hakonechloa neatly.

We planted low growing bulbs too, Anemone blanda and Narcissus golden bells.

I ordered from Ebay 10 tiny baby plantlets of Kalanchoe daigremontiana so planted them into cells to get them started.

While moving a succulent in a terracotta pot I noticed this rather handsome moth with beautiful markings, in particular its pale yellow ‘Y’ shape on each wing. Using my Apple mobile phone I found out it’s called a ‘Silver Y’ but on my specimen the ‘Y’ shapes definitely look yellow. The rest of its colours and patterns are in shades of grey with some chocolate brown markings. The ‘Silver Y’ is a migratory moth and is likely to be the commonest of our migrators.

Sadly throughout 2024 our unusual cotoneaster, the yellow berried Cotoneaster rothschildianus has been looking increasingly unhealthy until late summer when it lost all its foliage and looked dead. On close inspection we found this to be the case, so Ian our gardener and I worked together to take it up.

The photo below left shows the place where roots should have been but they are completely missing.

An important task to be done at this time of the year is to thin out the branches of our Malus ‘Butterball’ so Ian set about thinning out badly shaped, crossing branches as well as any dead or diseased ones.

We soon had an audience of very nosey sheep who fancied a nibble of the malus leaves, sometimes pulling branches from us or having a sort of tug of war trying to pull branches through the fence.

The view outwards once the butterball was cleaned up was more open and we could see the hills better than before.

One of the brightest flowering plants in our September garden is this orange, yellow and red Mahonia called Mahonia nitens ‘Cabaret’. It attracts so many pollinators that it buzzes with sounds of bees, wasps and hoverflies.