Putting down roots

This time of year is often seen as a last hurrah for gardens, with brilliant displays of late flowering perennials and fiery autumn foliage, before shutting up shop until the spring. Last October though I wrote about making the most of the autumn to get ready for next year (‘Getting ahead of the game’) and in view of the results of a couple of recent surveys about our horticultural habits it seems appropriate to return to that theme.......

What the surveys by the Royal Horticultural Society and the Horticultural Trades Association have revealed is that the majority of gardeners believe that the spring is the best time of year to buy new plants and plant them out. While spring is often not a bad time to do this, the best time is actually, in most cases, the autumn, a fact that seems to have been forgotten.

Traditionally most planting was undertaken in the autumn, with nurseries displaying stock beds of plants during the summer for people to view but then waiting until the dormant season to dispatch orders, in time for planting between October and December. The arrival of plastic pots in the 1960s however led to the current habit of buying plants and planting them throughout the year, and particularly in spring. This habit though was motivated mainly by the commercial advantages for retailers and the convenience for consumers, rather than horticultural wisdom.

The principal advantage to planting in the autumn is that it is a gentler, less stressful introduction for the plant to their new home. Soil remains relatively warm right up to the New Year and there is also usually plenty of moisture around, which gives plants the opportunity to develop their roots and be more self-sufficient by the time spring arrives (this applies to deciduous plants as well as evergreens as root growth is active in the former even after they have lost their leaves). This ‘head-start’ is particularly advantageous when conditions in the spring turn out to be dry, which seems to be increasingly the case, as it is springtime when plants are most likely to suffer from moisture stress as they seek to develop their new leaves.

Another advantage of autumn planting is the availability of bare-root and root-ball plants. These are plants that are field grown and only dug up and sold in the dormant season. To the environmentally conscious this means the plants have neither been potted up in peat based compost nor watered artificially, while to the cost conscious it means cheaper plants. Trees, hedging and roses are the mostly likely types of plants to be available in this way.

While you are out planting you can hopefully also enjoy some last minute autumn sunshine. For more information on autumn planting go to www.rhs.org.uk/autumnplanting or get hold of the October edition of the RHS’s The Garden magazine.