One minute you are ruefully surveying the damage from the summer’s fiercest heat and then, blink, you are worrying about protecting your more tender plants from winter’s icy blasts.
There should have been three months in which you could have got ready, but somehow – as with the gift-getting – time has just been sucked into some weird vortex and you have no more excuses to put off actually getting on with the task ahead.
As with watering in a drought, the trick to succeed is triage. Firstly, work out which of your plants actually need protection and from what they need protection.
If that sounds obvious, it’s not. Some plants can survive quite a few degrees of frost, it is being wet that can be the killer. If your ground is heavy clay and you live in an area of high winter rainfall, as I do in the deep south-west, you know you have a problem.
Sarah keeps plants such as lantana in her ping pong roomSarah Beattie
Improvements in soil structure by years of mulching with bark have meant that in some parts of the garden I can now leave dahlia tubers and eucomis (the pineapple lily) in the ground and I just heap some dry ash leaves on the crowns when I have cut off and left around (but not on top of) the frost-blackened stems and leaves.
In other parts of the garden where the clay still forms a pan, I lift tubers but pot them in the spent compost of the summer pots. I used to store them in wooden trays but they made a lovely winter feast for rats in the barn so now they’re potted in dry compost and they sit, under cover, until spring in dry, cool, airy conditions.
The open-sided ping pong room is perfect. It also houses other big pots of plumbago, lantana, and pelargoniums.
I don’t always get it right – I sadly lost a bougainvillea last year. It should have spent winter on the landing as in previous years.
Protecting citrus trees
Citrus trees are mostly happier outside. Lemons are fairly hardy, down to -5˚C and lower and, if inside, can succumb to sooty mould or scale insect. When they are wrapped in Hessian or horticultural fleece, they cope better with the icy winds on the flowers, fruits or new leaves.
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At the petrol station in our nearest town there’s a huge lemon tree that is very cosseted. Every autumn a palisade is constructed around it and then it is swathed in what can only be described as a quilt. It seems like overkill but it fruits prolifically every year.
However, I am not sure I would actually want to consume anything grown quite so close to the road and pumps. Sweeter citrus need more warmth but even combava (Makrut limes) can cope outside – last spring I lost all the leaves but I pruned it and it came back even more luxuriantly.
Handy tools and solutions
Horticultural fleece is useful but if you want to prevent your garden looking like a Christo-inspired art installation, use it judiciously – and if you can be bothered, unwrap your plants in settled periods of good weather over the winter.
Sarah can leave her dahlia tubers in the ground, protected by dry ash leavesSarah Beattie
Temporary solutions against the cold – for those of us who live where winter can mean Christmas lunch on the terrace, but New Year huddled by the wood burner – are really useful. I make leaf duvets by stuffing fallen leaves into the big net bags in which you can buy kindling or top-up logs.
Stacked ready in the ping pong room, they can be deployed if Météo France warns a sharp frost is coming. I place them over things like my South American salvias such as Amistad, Black & Blue and Costa Rica.
According to textbooks, they probably should not survive the winter here, especially in the Gascon clay, but they do. And have done for at least 10 years. Salvia patens Cambridge Blue gets potted and put in the ping pong room, though – I am taking no chances on losing that one!
If you are going to be away for an extended period and can’t be taking covers on and off, you can still use leaves and cut material such as dry bracken fronds to protect more fragile plants. Just heaping dried leaves around plants will work up until you get a serious wind. And we do seem to be in the path of some very persistent winds over the winter months.
To prevent unwanted exposure, create a cage around your plants with bamboo canes and chicken wire and then loosely fill with leaves and fronds. If you have straw, dried long grass or pruned-off summer frazzlings, they can all be used too.
Bringing plants indoors
Really tender plants will need to come inside but may struggle from lack of light or, ironically, being too warm.
For many of us, the brightest spot is on the windowsill but that is directly over a radiator when the air can be too hot and too dry and fluctuates wildly between night and day. Your poor plants will suffer.
If you have a guest room not in use, turn the radiator down to minimum, create a reflector with foil to give more even light behind your plants and stand them on gravel in a tray. Ensure that they don’t dry out but do not over-water.
Oh, that reads like such a lot of work. Maybe we should pick hardier plants more suited to our growing conditions. Right place, right plant, right? I know Monty Don has said he is trying not to have unsustainable plants but we all do it – you see something just so beautiful that it becomes important to cocoon it, not lose it.
