Evergreens
I don’t think gardeners think much about evergreens. If you like reading, you might associate them with Georgian or Victorian novels. Some old overgrown evergreen shrubberies still survive. Depressing is the right word. But, November is the month when evergreens emerge from camouflage as colour falls back and flowers are razed by frost. The best give a lot – colour and density through the hardest winters, flowers in other seasons, they furnish difficult sites and some have remarkable coloured foliage like Euonymus japonicus ‘Extase’ or remarkable form like the hardiest palms.
I like them planted away from the edges of the garden, amongst everything else, and I like them small. Small because they are best looked down on, small because it might act to balance their herbaceous neighbours in other seasons, and small because they really can come to dominate and depress if they get too big. Small doesn’t mean a new dwarf variety (which has probably been improperly trialled and will subsequently die). Small can mean, ‘cut it down periodically,’ like my Ilex aquifolium varieties. Take Viburnum tinus (laurustinus). This has clusters of creamy white flowers from pink-flushed buds and oval mat evergreen leaves. The flowers start in October and continue through the winter.
My wife, who grew up in Birmingham, hates it. She says it reminds her of public lavatories in municipal parks where it’s grown high enough to hide the roughcasted walls of the men’s urinals. The slightly catty smell of the flowers, she says, is appropriate. Put it in your flower border. Keep it less than 1.5m high. Pick it with Viburnum × bodnantense and add an orange berry or two to clash. The ordinary form is good enough, but there are better. 'Eve Price' is the version most often seen. It is a neat grower with slightly larger foliage. V. tinus 'Lucidum' makes a larger and glossier bush that has bigger flowers but is tenderer. ‘French White’ has shinier foliage. ‘Gwenllian’ has bigger, pinker flowers, more densely held. ‘Spirit’ has redder flower heads but similar creamy-white flowers. Avoid the variegated form where the yellowish foliage and pinkish flowers can look nauseous together.
Saxifrages for the Shady Border
There are saxifrages big and robust enough that there’s no need to grow them on rockeries and walls. The ones here like a bit of shade. We all know London pride – Saxifraga × urbium. It’s indestructible and OK, but the form ‘Miss Chambers’ is better, with larger red-flushed dark green rosettes and maroon rather than pink flowers. Saxifraga stolonifera is generally grown as a house plant (mother of thousands), but it’s really a garden plant. Given free rein in dense shade where you can get nothing else to grow, it will root as it goes and smother the ground, then erupt in late spring with flowers. The best cultivars are ‘Maroon Beauty’ and a form that came to me from Japan as ‘double’. It’s barely double, but has wonderful big flowers and big leaves.
Then there’s Saxifraga fortunei. October and November are the months when varieties of this come into their own. It’s their propensity to flower in the autumn that distinguishes them from the rest. There may be close to a hundred varieties – mostly bred in Japan, although breeding is being pursued in Germany and southern England too. The flowers can be seriously amazing in reds, pinks, white, cream, and green, sometimes having persistent bract-like petals and sometimes being double and fimbriated. Apart from flowers, the best sorts also have exquisite coloured, textured, and marked foliage – good enough to make me feel that the flowers are superfluous. Some bloom early (May for the earliest), but mostly don’t start to look for flowers until at least late August. In the north, extend this by up to six weeks. Ground frosts have virtually no effect on the flowers, but air frost will burn them off.
My experience is that flower buds will then continue to push out and open in milder periods following these colder periods. In northern Germany, they are sold to flower indoors in early winter, and I have successfully tried this – leaving the pots outside in shady border areas amongst perennials and picking them up to bring into protected conditions as the remainder of the border collapses around them. Sadly, November is the worst month for nursery and garden centre plant sales, so they’ve never had quite the public exposure they deserve.
Fatsias
Fatsias are good garden plants, but they have their problems. I cannot think of any other hardy shrub that has quite such large, shapely, bold foliage. Bold foliage leavens fussiness whilst retaining its own drama. It also contrasts wonderfully with walls and paving. The leaves persist until June or July, when the new ones grow. I sat reading on a still July day when the intermittent clatter they made as they fell was remarkable. On icy winter mornings, the pulvinus at the leaf base pumps out water and collapses, making the leaf hang wearily. When the temperature rises, back they pop. I reckon their peak viewing month is November. By this month, the foliage is well-established, and the creamy-white flowers begin to open – large rounded umbels in bold compound heads at the end of each shoot. By May, these have turned into rounded heads of bloom-covered black berries, still from white stems, and are both intrinsically attractive and feed fruit-hungry birds.
Problems? Yes. Two. The ordinary form is eventually gawky, and its ungainly shape cannot be reformed by pruning. Then the leaves should be an attractive deep green, but they’re often a sickly yellowish green. To change the first, you need to be selective about cultivars. For a compact, broader-than-tall kind, choose F. japonica ‘Moseri’, which can get as high as 2m, but if pruned smaller, will retain its shape. Both variegated kinds are also shapely and compact. ‘Variegata’ is often sold as a houseplant but is a great garden plant, especially under trees where the variegation shines. ‘Spider’s Web’ has new leaves that are almost entirely white, mature to be webbed by green, and persist entirely green. Its flowers are startlingly white.
Sun is the prime cause of the second problem. Fatsias are understory woodland plants and resent sun. Woodland floors tend to be drier because tree roots use most of the available moisture. Thus, I’ve diagnosed that ground that’s too wet can also cause yellowing. And, maybe, very alkaline soils are a problem too. Japanese plants have a tendency to be haters of extremely limy soils, and I get better results when I grow them where the pH is lower.