It’s the last day of 2024, as I write this. By now many gardeners have “put their gardens to bed,” a phrase which rings false for multiple reasons. I suppose those who preside over their plot by directing the hired exterior decorating team (weekly lawn mowing, hedge trimming, weeding, adding even more mulch – and most important, blowing every morsel of debris out of sight or, perhaps, into the street or neighbor’s property) have by now long forgotten those instructions which were ordered to be completed well before Thanksgiving. And, as we are taught now to “leave the leaves” and wait until spring to cut the spent perennials from last year’s bounty, thus allowing beneficial insects and birds a place of winter refuge and food, putting the garden to bed is now, at least among committed gardeners, a thing of the past. 

I am not guilt-free in some of this activity but, with one big exception: I do it myself, without hurry and with detailed care and knowledge. The exception comes by the end of the first week in December, and I nervously watch the weather reports (t is always nip and tuck) to avoid an event which occurred a decade ago when the first snow – a half foot! – arrived on December 5^th, surprising even the weather mavens.  All the fall leaves remained unraked, including the thousands from the Norway maple which smother and rot rather than coddle the lawn and perennials nestled below. And there they remained for the entirety of that icy cold, abnormally long winter, causing considerable damage. This year saw no such disaster, as our cold December let up just enough for the four-man Leaf Army, arriving on December 13 with deafening gas-fueled blowers, to accomplish their task within 3 hours. Try as I might to remove no carbon from my one acre by “composting in place,” there is so much of it by late fall that goal remails elusive. It is always alarming to see the giant pile that is expertly blown into the narrow funnel of the leaf vacuum to be hauled off-site, presumably to the municipal compost operation.

This year, after reading about it in Fine Gardening Magazine, I am experimenting with raking unmulched Norway maple leaves about 6-inches deep over a Hosta bed holding about a hundred individual plants within an area of about 20 x 20-ft. The article claims the new leaves will push through the 6-inch leaf cover and emerge in the spring just fine. We shall see…and I plan to keep a watchful eye out to make sure that is the case. I will be prepared to quickly rake away the leaves if the pile is rotting the new Hosta shoots. If it works, I have found yet another way to reduce the carbon that exits my little acre – and maybe make the Hosta roots happy over yet another winter with the probability of little insulating snow cover. 

During much of this Fall I have reduced considerably the volume of leaves to be removed by bi-weekly mulching the leaves, as they fall, with my battery-mower, allowing the newly mulched leaf litter to enrich the turf. I also started a new late November regime to mow down (yes, with a 21-inch wide EGO battery-powered mower) the little woodland meadow of Fillipendula, Hosta, and other meadow perennials. Back and forth I run the mower, pulverizing all in its path, straining my trusty friend at times as it groans slowly forward – and angering it mightily as it occasionally hits a rock.  And, of course, this newly formed leaf litter will stay in place to enrich this ground which lies mostly beneath the giant Norway maple which is thought to be a hostile growing environment due to the shallow roots of the maple. A spring walk through this area will confound anyone believing this gardening truism and astound the visitor who will admire scores of (mostly) spring ephemerals, ferns, and epimediums.

One of my favorite times at Uptop is the day or two after the Leaf Army has retreated. All is quiet, the grass is still green, the architectural edges and subtle axes have reemerged from summer’s overabundance of green and the fall’s overabundance of brown fallen leaves. I see my garden now as it was laid out 30 years ago by this architect-gardener. As hackneyed as it may be to say… I again see the bones of the place now that so much of the flesh has been removed.

Fall is the singular best time to take stock and, working around occasional cold or rainy spells, make adjustments. For instance, after nearly 30 years of maintaining my desired razor strait edges along the narrow grass path between the north and south borders, I realized what a waste of time this is. Not allowing the perennials to invade the grass or vice versa is a continual task – and a somewhat fruitless one (and famously castigated by Mirabel Osler in her brilliant essay “A Gentle Plea for Chaos”). Why, it finally dawned on me, did this heavily-trafficked and compacted path, need to be grass? Indeed! I took to eliminating it by placing black polyethylene sheeting (over 100-ft long) over it for 8 weeks. By late October the grass was history, leaving only brown thatch. A bit of heavy raking removed the thatch and 2-inches of stone dust was laid on the bare ground. In the spring, after allowing the stone dust to settle in, a top layer of gravel will be added. No more defined edges… just perennials flopping over on the gravel path. Perhaps, the way it always should have been.

The north and south borders, once full of perennials which provided color most of the summer and fall, have become shadier requiring a new approach. Many more evergreen shrubs have been added, creating little pockets for shade-tolerant perennials. The effect is beautiful, serene and mostly green. Yet, I missed some splash of color. Only one spot in the garden existed where sun shone most of the day. So late last fall, I greatly enlarged this area and have, surprising myself, added a small riot of colorful annuals, an anathema in my early gardening days. 

After an extraordinarily warm fall followed by a cold December, we had a reprise right after Christmas with 3 sunny days when the temperature pushed toward 60. Taking advantage, I methodically de-thatched many discrete lawn areas, removing alarming quantities of brown thatch, magically turning each area emerald green.

These operations, among several others, have kept me outside in good weather all fall making significant adjustments to this little acre of paradise. Hardly “letting go.”