Before the last leaves swirl away, take a break from raking to make some notes about this year’s garden. “Remembering what happened and what you did this year is important for having a successful garden next year,” said Julie Janoski, Plant Clinic manager at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle.
If you’re not one of the rare gardeners who keeps a regular garden journal, autumn is a good time to catch up. “Write down what strikes you now and what you can remember while the season is still fresh in your mind and you can still see the plants with some leaves,” she said.
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Take a slow walk around the garden with a notepad and a camera. “Photos will help you remember things in winter when the branches are bare,” she said. Even backyard family snapshots taken over the summer provide garden information, if you can see the plants behind the people.
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Make notes of the plants that thrived and those that struggled this year. If some shrubs have become too large or are blocking walkways or windows, put them on a list to be pruned in winter when they’re dormant. Note perennials or groundcovers that have outgrown the space you have for them and need to be cut back, divided or removed.
If some plants didn’t do well or didn’t bloom much, try to figure out why. Perhaps a plant was in too much shade or is not suited to your soil type. Perhaps you need to learn more about the care it requires. “Some problems are fixable and some aren’t,” Janoski said. “The answer may be to choose a more appropriate plant for the site next year. But you can’t make those decisions if you don’t recall that there was a problem.”
Make notes of how you experienced this year’s garden. Did you feel your sitting spot needs more of a privacy screen? Was there a dull view that could use a punch of color? Did you plant too much of one kind of vegetable and not enough of something else? Did you feel burdened by the care that some of your plants required? Was there a plant you just loved?
It’s also critically important to remember the weather. Despite a few spectacular storms, “this has been a very dry year,” Janoski said. With a changing climate, unpredictable extremes of weather — such as rain that comes only in occasional bursts, with drought in between — are becoming more common.
“This isn’t the last dry year we will have, so you might list the perennials that really suffered and think about replacing them with something more resilient,” she said.
There’s another important reason to remember the dry weather: It can affect trees for years. “Trees take a long time to show the effects of stresses such as drought,” Janoski said. “If one of your favorite trees starts to decline three or four years from now, it may be due to this year’s dry weather.” Watering trees deeply now can still help them.
Now is also a good time to make resolutions about what you can do differently. You might plan to water your trees next year, or be more diligent about maintaining a mulch layer everywhere in the garden to hold precious moisture in the soil, or replace part of your thirsty lawn with more drought-tolerant plants.
In January, when the new plant catalogs come out, or in March, when the first warm days tempt us outside, a record made this fall will be invaluable for directing your shopping and gardening efforts.
“It’s always better to work from real information instead of general assumptions or conventional wisdom,” Janoski said. “Keeping records of what actually happens in your garden is the basis for a more beautiful landscape and a more satisfying experience.”
For tree and plant advice, contact the Plant Clinic at The Morton Arboretum (630-719-2424, mortonarb.org/plant-clinic, or [email protected]). Beth Botts is a staff writer at the Arboretum.