After what looks like it must have been a drought-induced false start a few weeks ago, Autumn seems to be getting into its stride now, and many of the trees and shrubs we rely on for autumn colour are starting to do their stuff.

Where's that Steeleye Span when you need them?

Thursday brought welcome – but not overly generous – rainfall, and left the ground wet enough to deliver our first proper misty moisty autumnal sunrise yesterday; friends and neighbours are helping to stuff our larder with seasonal bounty from their gardens, and with breakfast time temperatures hovering only a few degrees above freezing, it’s really starting to feel as if winter must be limbering up in the wings.

The nursery closes for the winter next week, but with this seasons first bare root tree delivery scheduled for a couple of weeks time, it doesn’t look like activity levels will be dropping any time soon.

Being optimisitic sorts, we thought that the drought conditions we were describing back in September would be well and truly broken by now.   But sadly not – we’ve still had virtually no rain.

The soil is still just as dry as it was when we photographed our northerly neighbour harrowing back in September, so we knew there’d be some dust when our other neighbour started cultivating this week. His field borders the nursery to the south and east; sadly his ploughing was accompanied by a brisk south-easterly wind, so from time to time we were treated to the spectacle of there being enough airborne soil that we couldn’t actually see much of the nursery.

And now the entire site has a thick dusting of our neighbours soil over it.

Enough dust to write in -inside the polytunnel!

The Met Office are forecasting rain for tomorrow – hopefully it’ll be at least enough to settle the dust.

We’ve always thought of Shropshire as a wetter than average sort of place, so it’s something of a culture shock to find ourselves praying for rain – but if we don’t get a much-wetter-than-average winter, there’ll surely be trouble ahead.

There are lots of plants that’ll bring colour to your garden in the autumn – but if you make the right choice, some of your insect buddies might add a bit of their own….

Red Admirals love Sedum....

There doesn’t seem to have been very many butterflies about this season, but the Sedum coming into bloom seems to be bringing them in – this one, and two of his friends were feasting on our Sedum ‘Frosty Morn’ today, alongwith several small tortoiseshells (but they were rather more camera shy).

It may be late, but there’s still loads of plants that’ll bring a bit of colour to your autumn borders….

A view across part of our sales areas this morning

It hasn’t rained here for ages.  Really ages.   In fact, we can’t remember the last time we had a period of significant rain – it was probably about a year ago.     Then we had a really cold winter – lots of snow, but not much water in that, then an absurdly warm and dry spring, and then a reasonably okay sort of summer, warmish, calm, and dry.

Watching the weather forecasts this year has been like one of those crazy dreams where you can never quite reach the stuff you need (everyone has those, don’t they?).   There has been lots of rain around, but as soon as it approaches Shropshire on the forecast maps it just seems to evaporate, and the clouds go everywhere but here.

The garden is completely knackered – we don’t water the ornamental garden at all, trying to work with plants that will cope with our always-less-than-moist soil, but even they’ve been defeated by this years conditions.   Our veg plots have only survived because we’ve spent hours (many hours) hand watering.

We could illustrate this with a photo of our parched garden plants, but frankly that’d just be embarrassing.   So we were pleased to have a different photo opportunity this afternoon, when one of our neighbouring farmers decided to harrow his field.   Normally this is an entirely unremarkable event, but today, rather than calmly breaking down the soil and leaving it ready for sowing, the process seemed to have been extended to include sharing a good proportion of the field with the neighbourhood – as we, and anybody else trying to breath nearby, were consumed in clouds of dust-dry earth.   If it had been windier, the ploughman could have extended his largesse to the neighbouring county.

Dusty

Dustier

There's a tractor in there somewhere...

The garden is knackered, but we’ve been irrigating the nursery – it’s seemed at times as if that’s all we’ve done this season – and there are still huge swathes of late season colour to enjoy. Maybe that’ll be tomorrows photo opportunity.

Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s you couldn’t consider yourself a hip and happening gardener if you didn’t have a conifer bed. Actually, you probably wouldn’t have recognised the need, because there was almost certainly no such thing as “hip and happening” back then – but whatever expression was in use, if you wanted to follow the gardening fashion, conifers were where it was at.

Gardening fashion is as fickle as any other of course, and the 80’s enthusiasms for Adrian Bloom, Foggy Bottom, Island beds and and all things conifer were soon cast aside in favour of the 90’s obsessions with decking, blue fencing, architectural planting and Groundforce stylee makeovers.

The noughties saw a bit of a hiatus in garden fashion, but Monty Don made a valiant effort to set a trend and revive the fortunes of the conifer when he planted one of the front borders at Berryfields(¹) with them;  sadly, it barely got its 15 minutes of fame before Monty crashed and burned from our screens, and Berryfields found itself consigned to TV gardening history.

A conifer for every occasion....

But where Monty failed, the great British weather triumphed – the last couple of winters have despatched an awful lot of the hoped-to-be-hardy plants that were planted in the Groundforce years, and gardeners looking for tougher replacements for their architectural specimens are focusing once again on the charms of the conifer.

We’ve always sold conifers here, but they’ve tended to get mixed up in the general melee of the sales areas, and have never been a proper feature on the nursery.   But no more!   With increased customer interest in them, and National Conifer Week on the horizon, we’ve made some changes – and the Barlow Nurseries conifer department is now open!

All our conifers (except the hedging ones) are now grouped together;  we’ve increased our stock, and now offer all sorts of shapes and colours, in all sorts of sizes – from smaller plants in 3 lt pots, up to well established 15 lt specimens.

So if you’re wondering what to put where that Phormium/Eucalyptus/Ceanothus/Bay/Trachycarpus/Tree fern/etc, etc used to be, we may be able to help!

(¹) Berryfields – actually Burmans Farm, Shottery, Stratford-on-Avon – was the TV garden from 2003 – 2008.

If you read Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto’s book Dear Friend and Gardener (and we’re not suggesting you should – it’s a less than riveting read) one of the things you may notice is that the friends often boast to each other that they have particularly “good forms” of various plants in their gardens.   It’s never clear whether this is because the plants in question are simply performing well because they like the particular soil and climate of the gardens, or whether they are actually distinct variants of the cultivars in question.

We were reminded of this recently when we read Andrew Mikolajski’s blog in which (eventually) he tells us that he doesn’t much like Buddleja weyeriana.

Now we do like B. weyeriana, and have grown it for many years (tho’ perhaps rather self indulgently, because it’s not a big seller).   But the plant we enjoy doesn’t sound very much like the one that Andrew derides.

If you Google image search the plant, you will see a fair bit of variation in the flowers, the majority of which do look rather more like the wishy-washy orange-purple that Andrew dislikes, and few (well, none that we found) which look as nice as the  plant we’ve been growing.

So can we safely claim to have a “good form” of Buddleja weyeriana?

Is this a good one?

Parent plants don’t get to have much fun;  they’re no sooner in growth in spring than a man with secateurs comes and butchers them for cuttings.   And in the autumn,  just as they’re thinking they might slow down and have a kip through winter, he comes around and does it all again.  Chelsea chop doesn’t come into it – these guys get all but demolished twice a year.

But for a few short months between scalpings they’re allowed to do their own thing – and in summer, the parent aisle in the polytunnel looks lovely:

Make hay while the sun shines...

Sadly, they don’t enjoy a long life either – after a couple of years, just as they’re starting to think they’ve got a handle on the annual routine, the man with the secateurs comes around again, replaces them with one of their offspring, and consigns them to the compost heap.   S’not easy being a parent.

The first of the autumn tree deliveries arrived this morning.   Yep, autumn.   Like the football season, it seems to start earlier each year.   That’ll keep us busy for a while.

Our supplier's very first despatch of the new season...apples, pears, plums, gages, cherries, medlars, quince, kiwis, and all sorts of ornamental trees, all looking for a good home

Maybe it's time we bought a seed sowing machine...

Last week we were mostly sowing seeds…..

And this week we’ve been mostly marvelling at the speed and enthusiasm with which so many of them have germinated.

Sempervivum take the prize for being both the smallest seeds, and the fastest germinators.   Their seed is vanishingly small;  according to the packet the contents weighed just 0.07 grams (¹) and we had to sow this microscopically small quantity into 60 separate plugs.   But barely had the seed  touched the compost than it was showing signs of life – miraculous specs of green were appearing less than 48 hours later.

And most of the rest of the seeds were equally enthusiastic – within the week, the majority of trays were showing green shoots.

Our favourites are always the Lupins – in contrast to the Sempervivums these seeds are huge, and get buried under a thick blanket of vermiculite; when they germinate, more or less in unison, they push their covers aside, and wave flag-like seed leaves to the sky.   Anyone old enough to remember is bound to think “Quatermass”.

They're coming to get you....

For our own sanity we haven’t counted the plugs; there was about 5 man days labour in the sowing – in just a few weeks time we’ll be potting up, and that’s going to take just a bit longer……

(¹) You have to wonder at the technology in use at the seed merchant to weigh and handle such absurdly tiny volumes;  and whether they have to screen their employees for hayfever (the comedic potential for sneezy operators would be huge, though we have to concede Woody Allen got there first – remember the cocaine scene in Annie Hall?).