Fall Gardening Chores: How to Clean Up Your Garden and Respect Nature Too

With its beautiful light, artfully fading flowers, and subtle shifts in color as the leaves turn, autumn is a magical time of the year. It’s a season for slowing down, and appreciating this golden moment, but in my garden at least, it’s also a time where there are, as always, many, many chores (and never enough time to get them done). I want to appreciate the loveliness for as long as possible, yet I also want to ensure that the garden looks as good as it can through the long winter.

As with most things in the garden, climate change is scrambling time-honored routines and forcing us to recalibrate what we do and when we do it. If “putting the garden to bed” was once a routine for late autumn, tidying up borders and placing them under a cozy layer of mulch perhaps, the shifting seasons has made it almost impossible to follow these old habits.

Not that I’d want to follow all these “old ways” to the letter, in any case. Like most gardeners, I’ve come to appreciate leaving beautiful structure in the garden for winter, and allowing stems and debris to remain in order to  provide habitats for over-wintering creatures, too. But how can we find a middle ground, one that satisfies our need for some kind of order, while also respecting natural rhythms of all the lifeforms in our gardens?

Photography by Clare Coulson.

Plant bulbs later.

Warmer winters create a particular conundrum when it comes to getting spring bulbs planted. At home, my borders can still look colorful and abundant until late November and gradually the task of tidying borders and getting bulbs into the ground has crept later and later. But at a certain point, practicality will win out and I will tidy up the borders, get bulbs into the ground and then layer with a rich compost. The rest of my bulbs will go into pots, topped with a fine chicken wire to prevent squirrels or rodents eating them over winter.