Get out the shears (Filed: 02/11/2002)

To cut, or not to cut the border down is the topic of the moment. New Europeans, those followers of Piet Oudolf, will want to leave the spent perennials, all stems and seed heads, for the birds. The great guru Christopher Lloyd also adopts this bird-lover policy, on the grounds that clearing up in spring is much easier than doing it now. Light as thistledown the stalks will be, I have heard him say.

It is true that carrying really dead plants to the compost heap in February is easier than hauling wet leafy stems in November, but I am not convinced. A very weak addition to the leave-it-till-later brigade's argument is that the seed heads will look so wonderful in frost.

Frosts are rare now and what we usually get in English winters are days of rain. Wet weather causes plant skeletons to go black and rot, so that they collapse in sodden heaps.

I rarely see that light dusting of filigree silver that makes photographers drive miles in the dark days. In East Anglia and the North it may be more common, but in the South such special effects are limited to a couple of mornings a year.

Old gardeners used to get everything down and tidy during what they call Back End, which means before Christmas. There is a lot to be said for it. Weather and rain have undone the garden here, so that I can't wait to get it ready for the spring.

If you grow plenty of half-hardy things like dahlias, salvias, penstemons and lobelias, you need to get into borders to get them lifted or propagated. Here, we have taken to digging up large plants of salvias, such as S. involucrata 'Bethellii', or 'Indigo Spires', which are important summer features.

They go into pots and are then stored fairly dry under the staging in the frost-free greenhouse. This means we have bigger plants to put out at the end of May and that we use less space.

We take cuttings when growth starts in spring rather than doing a lot now, which will occupy precious room on the benches. Slightly tougher plants such as lobelias go into the unheated frame.

Clearing leaves plenty of bare ground for tulips, which must be in by December. Roses also get some attention at this time of year. Left unpruned, they are much more likely to rock and have their roots disturbed, because the worst gales - like the one last weekend - tend to be in October.

If all these reasons were not enough, the dread of compaction would make me opt for sooner rather than later. Walking on wet ground is very bad for it; the less you trample about in your flower beds over the winter, the better, so it makes sense to do everything at once.

Clearing, pruning and planting of bulbs can all be done so that you can then back out of the beds forking it up as you go. Even then you may need to work off scaffolding boards.

The last and best reason for closing the show soon is that you can open it earlier next year. Those who commit themselves to a forest of rotting stalks all winter can never enjoy the smallest and earliest of bulbs.

Snowdrops, crocuses and scillas come up in all the bare patches as early as the end of January in the summer garden here. The continuing process of the garden flowing from one year to the next is what grabs me. Spring-cleaning is for houses, not gardens. Think of autumn as the start of an even better season in 2003.

-- Anonymous, November 01, 2002