An Autumn Review for your Garden
“Autumn can be beautiful. It can be rich with colour and smoky light, and it can be full of flower and fruit, but autumn is always sad. The party is over and the light…is slipping away”
- Monty Don, Down to Earth
Poor Monty. I’ve seen English gardens in winter and they are definitely a sombre affair. Wet, muddy earth, bare trees, absent insects. Everything is still and skeletal. I can see why autumn is a bittersweet time. The changing leaves and the way the evening light has a hazy golden glow would be nothing but wonderful if they weren’t signals that the coldest, darkest season is approaching.
Fortunately for those of us in Western Australia (and many other mild-climate regions around the world), autumn doesn’t have to be such an anguished time. In fact, autumn is one of my favourite seasons to be a gardener. Summer in Australia can feel hot, oppressive and stagnant. Plants struggle against the heat, week-old seedlings shrivel under the sun’s glare and gardening is pretty much the sweatiest and most exhausting activity imaginable. On the other hand, our winters are - relatively - mild. So instead of heralding in months of grey, frosted gloom, autumn brings a cool reprieve from the suffocating February heat; a time to re-emerge from our air-conditioned houses, prune back wild summer growth, feed the soil, review the year that has passed and plan for spring.
If planning for next spring in late summer sounds crazy to you, I understand. It took me many years to appreciate the way times passes in the garden. If you only buy seedlings when they are ready to plant, it can feel like gardens leap up instantly from the soil with very little waiting or planning required. It was only when I started planting seeds and bulbs that I got a real feel for just how long things can take in the garden and how much forward thinking is - sometimes - necessary. All this planning might sound intimidating or effortful, but actually it’s been one of the most beautiful and rewarding realisations: as the days grow shorter and colder and the sun slips away, the gardener’s mind is already onto springtime. To bulbs bursting out of the soil, rosebuds, cabbage moths and crisp, blue mornings.
The difficult thing about the pace of our gardens is that it can lead to a lot of good ideas and observations being forgotten. Mental notes made in September have all but vanished by March (when you need them most). We forget what plants grew well, what fruited and what didn’t. We forget when our flowers bloomed, and when we first sowed them as tiny seeds. Just like our gardens, our minds are beautifully imperfect. But that’s a bit of a pain when it comes to remembering to get your sweet peas in on time.
So! I’ve made something to help - it’s a free interactive worksheet you can download and fill in to look back on everything that has happened during your last year of gardening! For ages I’ve meant to actually write down observations about my own garden. I know how much it would help, but I always forget/never make the time. SO, I want to propose that we all form a new habit that will improve your gardening immensely: the Annual Autumn Garden Review.
People do annual reviews for all manner of things - businesses review profit margins and…stuff… at the end of the financial year. Some people review their goals and achievements at the end of each year. Others have existential freak-outs before every single birthday, trying to work out what on earth they’re doing with their brief and farcical lives (I know absolutely nothing about that, obviously). We all have our specific dates that represent endings and new beginnings. For the gardener, I think autumn epitomises endings and beginnings, making it the perfect month to do an annual garden review (you can download your own annual review worksheet by clicking on the ‘add to cart’ button below)
This worksheet will help you review the last year in your garden - what worked and what didn’t, and what areas you’d like to work on for next year.
Taking a few moments to note down what happened in your garden (and when) over the last year is an invaluable exercise - it can help you spot patterns, decide what to plant next, and troubleshoot tricky aspects of your garden. A fantastic way to understand your garden better, and help it to flourish.
On the subject of a farcical existence, I have to admit that I had never actually done an autumn garden review until I made this worksheet (a quick google search for ‘gardening review worksheet’ wasn’t massively successful, so maybe that’s why!). Anyway, yes, I’ve jotted down notes in my phone, and definitely having a gardening instagram account helps me keep track of what’s working and when, but I’d never formalised it in any kind of way. So, as strange as it is, I can offer you a surprisingly genuine review of my autumn review worksheet: it was astonishingly helpful! I should probably take my own advice more often! If you’re interested, you can see my filled-out worksheet below and have a read of where I’m at with my garden.
As I filled out my own worksheet I scrolled back through the (admittedly excessive) photos I took of the garden over 2020, and it really brought a few things home. It reminded me exactly which flowers added colour to my winter garden (Nemesia! Daisies! Pansies, violas and sea lavender!). I had totally forgotten about these beautiful flowers, but (thanks to my handy dandy worksheet) have now remembered them just in time to get the seeds going in March. Going back over the whole year also really helps show you exactly how much you’ve done and learned (probably a whole lot more than you realise) so it’s a surprisingly satisfying and confidence-building exercise!
It was also helpful to have to actually list my areas for improvement and ideas for tackling problems I’d encountered in the garden last year. I found myself researching how to combat Hollyhock rust and learned that there are some rust resistant varieties available now, that I need to split up my patch of Hollyhocks so they’re not so densely packed, and that I should grow them in a drier, sunnier garden bed. I also learned that I need to fertilise my corn with chicken manure (high in nitrogen) next year to help them grow! Sure, I could have googled that stuff anytime, but the fact that I hadn’t until now suggests to me that I need to actually sit down and make myself do these things. Who knew!
I guess now I should stop going on about how handy the worksheet is (it really is handy!!!) and just strongly encourage you to give it a go! It’s free, after all - as all the best things in life tend to be
…except gardens, they cost you a friggin’ arm and a leg*
* 100% worth it. Every time.