A stillness descends on the garden in January. Greenery pulled back to resting buds and all that is necessary to sustain the winter. It used to be that I wanted these weeks to be short, to be reunited with growth again, but increasingly this time feels precious for the opportunity to look at the bones. Quietened and slowed by the season and with all laid bare to see.
The weeks ahead are rarely a downtime and we are seldom plunged into a winter that makes the garden unworkable. Our snow lasts for no more than a few days and frost rarely stays in the ground for long. Winter here is a time for doing, readying and making changes. To be lost in actions and practicalities, with a mind’s eye on the spring. At least, this is how I see it and, at the beginning of January, I make a list of winter work that will take us through to the middle of February. The moment the snowdrops are in full swing, letting me know that the garden will also be stirring. In time to be ready to wade into the beds to remove the remains of the last season and free the resting buds to the air and the lengthening days.
The winter tasks begin with pruning and initiating order now that the leaves are down. When I started my formal training in the 1980’s we began the pruning at leaf drop, to work on the hardiest woodies first and to save the least hardy until the tail end of winter. So apples and pears and wall-trained fruits and climbers were the first point of focus. We paced ourselves and worked towards the roses, leaving them until the end of February to avoid making cuts that could then be burned by a freeze. I remember the winters then being harder and rose wood blackened from cuts made too early, but I have brought this work forward here in Somerset. In the ten years we have been here, we have never had a winter that has damaged the wood and the time I make up early in the year allows time for detailed work before winter tips in to spring. Mulching the parts of the gardens where there are bulbs that are yet to push through and splitting the perennials that stir early in March.
The winter work takes us out into the landscape with tree planting and hedge work and this is a good place to be to retain a clear overview and look back upon the garden. This year, with the help of John, who’s been helping us in the garden since April, we cleared the banks under the hazel at the top of the ditch where the snowdrops were already beginning to nose through the ground in December. They seem to appear earlier every year and I’d made plans to fell a mature hazel that we’d allowed to grow out from a previously broken hedge. There are just a handful of established hazel on the land, but the sixty or so youngsters I’ve planted to make a new coppice should be ready for harvesting by the time we have coppiced the elders.
Hazel responds well to coppicing on an eight to ten year cycle, sending up a fleet of fine young rods that thicken enough to harvest for wood and poles and branch at their reach to make a delicate weave for pea sticks. Wood cut in the first part of the winter retains a pliability that it loses the later it is cut, so the trigger of the snowdrops was useful in setting the winter work into motion in the last fortnight of December.
The old coppices I grew up with on the South Downs were well worked land and some of the oldest trees were possibly as much as a thousand years old with the middles of their ancient stools rotted away and the original plant sometimes broken into a family. Coppicing prolongs the life of a tree that responds well to it. Indeed, look at an old hazel that has been left unmanaged and you will often see its limbs leaning like nine pins and snapping at the stump. New growth regenerates from the wound, so management through coppicing simply takes advantage of this nature. The intervention of rotation improves the diversity in the wood, the pool of new light after the fell triggering the ephemerals like foxgloves which by nature live in the halfway place between the wood and the light at the margins.
Here on our banks beneath this recently felled hazel where we have been spreading the primroses about and planting wild daffodils, I expect to see a change these next couple of years. More speedwell, the bulbs basking in spring sunshine to feed their reserves and a proliferation of primrose seedlings that will take this opportunity to extend their reach whilst the going is good. It will not take long – two to three years for the hazel to close over again – and these newly established plants will begin a quieter time in the shadow.
We grade the cuttings, taking the wood for the burner and sectioning the rods for bean poles and the twiggery for pea sticks. The brash is bundled for faggots and a loose weave of unwanted branches is thrown back over the stumps to prevent deer grazing the new shoots in their first important year of ascending upwardly out of harm’s way. It is a process that we are happy to initiate and be part of as the year turns. One of renewal and hope and usefulness. A fine way to start a year that will not be without its challenges.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 9 January 2021
Winter is a productive season here in Britain. The weather rarely closes in to stop us for more than a few days and, with the garden in stasis, there is room to think and plan and do. The few truly dormant weeks saw us clearing another fallen tree in January, logging the wood for the winter and stacking the brush into piles (main image) that will become home to the creatures, lichens and fungi that like the protection and decay. If we have snow the tracks to and from the stacks advertise their occupancy but, where the surrounding grass gives way to the shelter within, there are already signs of the annual cleavers that climb into their cages and clothe them in summer. Before the hedges were cut we harvested a few bundles of hazel to provide twiggy support for broad beans and sturdy poles for the sweet peas and climbing beans. They are a welcome bounty and the result of cutting the hedges every other year to allow them time to flower and berry. Two years is just enough time for the oldest and strongest hazel in the hedge to push out a good length of twiggery. Next year, whilst the hedges are growing back, I will coppice a couple of our freestanding hazel. It is hugely gratifying to be self-sufficient for plant supports for the garden. Whilst they are regenerating the hazel stumps are protected from the nibbling of deer with woven cages of offcuts.
A coppiced hazel protected from deer by a cage of offcuts
Hazel poles harvested from the hedgerows
Though we complain here about the winter’s duration, I cannot help but compare these few fairly benign months to the harsh conditions at my project in Hokkaido. There the gardeners have to leave the frozen landscape in search of work whilst the garden lies beneath deep snow until late April. The rush of tasks to either side – in preparation for the slumber and then the great surge of activity in spring – is palpable in head gardener Midori’s communications. Meanwhile, here we are free to dig and prune and plant. What luxury it is to get things in order with these few weeks of down time on our hands.
The Meadow Garden at the Tokachi Millennium Forest in Hokkaido is under snow until late April. Photograph: Syogo Oizumi
It has been a busy winter for I am readying myself to plant up the first sections of the new garden that was landscaped last summer. This time last year the same ground lay fallow with a green manure crop protecting it from the leaching effect of rain and to keep it ‘clean’ from the cold season weeds that colonise whenever there is a window of growing opportunity. The winter rye grew thick and lush, except where the diggers had tracked over the ground during the previous summer’s building works, where it grew sickly and thinly, indicating that something needed addressing before going any further.
When we started the winter dig, the problem that the rye had mapped became clear. Not far beneath the surface the soil had become anaerobic, starved of air by the compaction and with the tell-tale foetid smell as you turned it. The organic matter in the soil had turned grey where the bacteria were unable to function without oxygen and the water ran off and not through as it should. Turned roughly at the front end of winter, like a ploughed field, the frost has since teased and broken this layer down and the air has made its way back into the topsoil to keep it alive and functioning. Though it is still too wet to walk across, you can see that the winter freeze and thaw has worked its magic and that, as soon as we have a dry spell, it will knock out nicely like a good crumble mix, in readiness for planting.
Digging over the compacted soil, working from boards to prevent further compaction
Time taken in preparation is never time wasted and it is a good feeling to give new plants the best possible start in their new positions. As the soil was previously pasture and we have the advantage of heartiness, the organic content is already good enough, so we will not be digging in compost this year. I want the plants to grow lean and strong so that they can cope with the openness and exposure of the site rather than be overly cosseted or encouraged to grow too fast and fleshy. Organic matter will slowly be introduced after planting in the form of a weed-free compost mulch to keep the germinating weeds down and to protect the soil from desiccation. The earthworms, which are now free to travel through the previously compacted ground, will pull the mulch into the soil and do the work for me.
One of the planting beds in the new garden half dug over to allow the frost to do its work
In the vegetable beds, where we have been working the soil and demanding more from it, the organic matter is replenished annually to keep the fertility levels up. Our own home made compost is dug in now that the heaps are up and running. The compost is left a whole year to break down so that one bay is quietly rotting whilst the other is being filled. If I had more time, or a forklift to turn it, I would have a better, more friable compost in just six months. Turning allows air into the heap and the uncomposted material moved to the centre heats the heap more efficiently to help to kill weed seeds.
One of the compost bays
My year old compost is only really good for turning in as it springs a fine crop of seedlings from the hay we rake off the banks in the summer. There are also rashes of garden plants; euphorbias that were thrown on the heap after their heads were cut in seed, bronze fennel, Shirley poppies, phacelia and a host of other plants that have lain dormant. No matter. Since the heaps sit directly on the earth the compost is full of worms, and this can only be good for the soil and its future aeration. You can see the soil in the garden getting better and darker, more friable and more retentive with every year that passes. A reward for the hard work and payback for the bounty that we take from it.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan We are sorry but the page you are looking
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