Head Gardeners’ tips
November 2024

It’s good practice to clear fallen leaves from lawns to prevent damage to the grass, however don’t be in too much haste to clear away all the leaves from your garden. They not only provide important habitat for overwintering insects, but they will also be incorporated into the soil by worms over the winter improving your soil structure. The same applies to the foliage of border perennials where stems and leaves are used to shelter insects and seed heads feed birds. Whilst undoubtably with all the rain some of this may be looking past its best and can be cut back, but a lot of seed heads can be left to provide structure to your garden over winter. Here in Salisbury, we leave a lot of the foliage to provide such structure and winter interest.  

If you’re lucky enough to have lots of leaves, then leaf mould is a wonderful thing to make – pile them all up in a corner somewhere, or inside a chicken wire frame to stop them blowing around, and leave them to rot down into a wonderfully crumbly earthy mulch which will be a fantastically nutritious material to add around your favourite plants as a mulch next year. A huge pile of leaves can rot down to a relatively small amount of leaf mould, and it’s something you cannot readily buy but will provide you with a free compost for the future. 

With the possibility of frost this month, it is good practice now to protect your tender perennials such as dahlias and some of varieties of salvia, including amistad. In Salisbury, we no longer lift these from our borders but prefer to protect them in situ with a layer of leaves weighted down by compost. There are of course no guarantees, and a very cold winter may mean we lose them, so we take some cuttings just in case. We do lift tender perennials in our containers and pot them into pots of very dry compost, which will help to protect tubers from frost, placing them in our unheated polytunnel. However, a greenhouse or dry shed should also suffice.   

November is the perfect time to plant your spring bulbs. Planting up some containers of bulbs now is a wonderful antidote to a cold wet day allowing us to look forward to warmer days of spring. There are so many to choose from; just pick your favourite colour scheme and think about the time of year you want the bulbs to come up next year. Tulips are a wonderful way to inject a serious amount of colour and joy into your garden and there are so many varieties that will start flowering from late March all the way through until the end of May.  

There are also a huge variety of daffodils, hyacinths, grape hyacinths, crocus, fritillarias, alliums and more that you can get in the ground now – many of which will come back year after year, so think of it as a long-term investment. Tulips are the only exception to this, and most varieties do need to be replanted each year to ensure a good display the following year. 

We also enjoy planting up some pots of forced bulbs of hyacinths, narcissus paperwhites and amaryllis which have been treated to flower and give us scent and colour earlier than they would in nature, making wonderful gifts at Christmas. 

This month we start feeding the birds again. During the summer months there is plenty of natural food in our garden including our native hedgerow, however as we go into winter this tends to be more scarce. It’s wonderful to watch the sparrows, many of whom nested in our garden this year, enjoying the feeders and they make a delightful sound as they do. A perfect accompaniment to a mid-morning cuppa as you take five minutes to enjoy a mindful moment in your garden.