Tucked deep into the corners of the garden, hidden under the canopies of acer, apple and magnolias, lie loose piles of leaves. Sweepings from my stone terrace and the garden path, the kitchen steps and the tiny, brick-floored courtyard, these fallen leaves are quietly rotting down into garden gold – the light and airy leaf mould that I will mix with bagged peat-free potting compost and grit, to use in my pots and planters next year.
The best time to collect is from now until Christmas, giving the entire winter for the leaves to break down. Here lie cherry and medlar, apple and hazel, greengage and plum. Slowly, they will crumble to a light but rich tilth, a home-made compost to enrich my own garden soil and the commercial compost I buy each spring.
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The leaves I don’t add to the pile are those of the Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Frisia’ and Ficus carica ‘Brown Turkey’, whose thick spines take forever to decompose. The difficult ones, that require shredding before they will rot, are hydrangea and wisteria, and those I defer to the council’s fortnightly recycling collections.
When I first made the garden, I introduced two large compost heaps, surrounded by planks like a weatherboard seaside house. They worked well when I remembered to turn the contents of leaves and prunings regularly, but in a small garden, every inch is real estate and I always resented the space they took up.
Their fate was finally sealed when (if you’re squeamish, look away now) a fox decided to curl up and die in one of them. Seeing his remains, with his living sibling sleeping next to him, almost broke this gardener’s heart. In their place is now a group of ferns, vast shuttlecocks with plumes as tall as a child.
The discarded leaves this garden and its neighbours produce are gathered each autumn and sit in the corners of the garden, prevented from blowing away by their own weight and the small trees that shade them. I have never found it necessary to bag them. The air and a little rain can get to them and I can easily monitor their progress. It takes a while for them to go from piles of yellow, rust and orange leaves to crumbly, dark-brown compost, but the result is worth the wait. They get only the occasional turn with the rake and seem to like being open to the elements.
Every gardener seems to have their own recipe for compost in the way they might for Christmas cake
This treasure is an integral element of the growing medium I make for potting my narcissi, crocuses and tulips. On its own, leaf mould is used around my martagon lillies: their deep-maroon petals and saffron freckles have recently become this gardener’s quiet success.
It was naive of me to buy a garden with no rear entrance. Originally a dying lawn on heavy clay, we dragged every sodden (or should that be sodding) bag of compost, top-soil and manure through the house. By which I mean up the front steps, through the long hall and out through the kitchen. To this day, every plant, piece of topiary and rose bush takes the same route, just as every bag of green waste has to come the opposite way. We live and learn.
Each spring sees bag after bag of mulch wheeled through the house. After being strangely sceptical as to its efficacy, I now swear by a thick, annual layer of mulch. The plants seem to appreciate it, but I like the way it allows me to take stock of the beds.
A spreading of mulch has a similar effect on the borders as tidying my desk – it allows me to see the wood for the trees, to appreciate what I already have in the bank. It may just be my tidy nature, but I find as much satisfaction in a freshly mulched border as I do in one in full bloom. I love the way the finely composted bark frames the recently pruned stems of perennials, and illuminates early cyclamen and crocuses. This year, the unfurling fronds of the ferns peeped through the mulch like tiny emerald crowns.
I will happily pay over the odds for good, branded garden compost. It is money well spent, though I will admit to mixing them up, adding grit or well-rotted manure, in the same way I would tinker with a recipe in the kitchen. I have never bought a ready-prepared compost perfect for pelargoniums or one rich enough for greedy dahlias. There is always some tweaking to be done.
At first, I worried what to do with spent compost after the bulbs had finished, assuming that every plant or bulb needed a fresh bag. Much of it went into the borders until I did my homework and realised the number of plants I grow that appreciate nothing more than a bit of tired old growing medium.
Wallflowers, for instance, and for the last couple of years cosmos, with which I have done rather well, knowing only now that they hate a rich diet. ‘Spent’ compost, perhaps that which has been home to spring bulbs, is also something I have used, accompanied by much grit, for all my potted herbs. The thymes and oreganos love something more akin to the sun-baked soil they might find on a rocky hillside.
Every gardener seems to have their own formula for compost in the way they might have a recipe for Christmas cake. Mine changes according to what I am planting, but one thing is for sure: it will contain plenty of my own ‘garden gold’, the light and friable leaf mould that appears, almost by magic from the corners of this garden. My own recipe, of course.
