Leaf fall, rain and cold, Saturday 29 November 2025

The leaves are all but gone on most of the trees in the garden. A few languidly hang on but a strong wind will tear them away, leaving a winter silhouette of skeletal trees. We have two evergreens: a dwarf juniper by the small pergola and the olive tree. There are two distinct strategies playing out. The first is dump the leaves, having absorbed their sugars, they are useless in winter, and grow a new lot in the spring. The buds are all ready there, awaiting warmth and longer days. And so, deciduous trees slip into winter dormancy. The other strategy is to keep the leaves, as the olive is doing, in the chance that even in the winter months there might be enough warmth for a little growth. Most conifers keep their leaves over the winter. Two common ones that don’t are the larch and the alder.

I note the silver birch is hanging on to most of its leaves. They are yellow with a tinge of green, definitely on the way out. The leaves are small and less susceptible to wind which does the final work of leaf fall. Trees in sheltered places hang on to their leaves longer. The beech when grown as a hedge hangs onto many of its dead leaves in the mesh of twigs; they simply can’t escape.

Many shrubs retain their leaves. I note we have privet, Viburnum tinus, holly, ivy, eleagnus, hebe, buddleia,  mahonia and cotoneaster all in leaf. It would be a drab garden without them. The viburnum is in flower, with clusters of white florets, the hebe has deep purple leaves, the eleagnus has variegated leaves, and the cotoneaster has its red berries.

There are few flowers around the garden. Marigolds keep us company, along with a clump of daisies, borage in the herb bed, and a loan scabious near the pond. In the wildflower bed, cosmos is flowering. It is an interloper, certainly not a native of these isles, coming from the Americas. I am curious about its name, as cosmos is another name for universe. Cosmology is the study of its origins and nature, not applicable to the flower. Wikipedia gives two possibilities for the name: cosmos derives either from the Greek meaning ordered world -in reference to the orderly arrangement of the floral structures – or kosmima – jewel – in reference to the jewel-like colours. It strikes me that neither meaning is particularly apt. All flowers are orderly and jewel can be applied to many.  

We have had some cold days this month, a few with early morning frosts. Frosts are good for the garden in that they kill off such pests as greenfly. A warm winter and you can get a plague of them come the spring. We have had quite a bit of rain with 74 mm so far this month. The average for November in London is 66 mm. I keep an eye on the pond which is filling, now four inches from full, when it had been 10 inches down in August.

I note, I switched from metric to imperial measures. I can visualise 4 inches rather than its metric equivalent 100 mm. This is a legacy of my age, being brought up with imperial. I can see 4 inches, I have to make an effort to see 100 mm, even turn it to inches.

This time of year there are few jobs to be done in the garden. At the Steering Group meeting we discussed how we can fill the time while we are there. We can of course sit around and chat, and shouldn’t be judgemental when there is little to do. Better to bring in projects. Anything from knitting, music, jigsaws. Write a poem perhaps. I have received the flax seeds that I ordered. These will be planted out in one of the three beds between the herb bed and the pergola in mid March. They will flower in late May or June; the bed will be a spectacular sight with hundreds of blue flowers. Once the flowers have died, the plants will be harvested, roots and all. The stems will be stripped back to their fibres, and the fibres spun to make threads and the threads weaved to make linen. Not a lot of linen, I have been told, enough for a tea towel. The growing doesn’t bother me but the spinning and weaving fills me with some trepidation. Life won’t be dull next summer.