Garden Plants - Autumn gardening - Herbaceous border

The herbaceous border is the glory of the British garden form, and while it requires a lot of work, staggering the tasks can make it relatively labour free throughout a lot of the year. You can say that in autumn an hour spent on the herbaceous border will save you a day in June!

Climbing roses can be pruned once they have finished flowering. Start planting spring-flowering biennials, such as wallflowers and forget-me-nots, in your more sheltered garden border areas. Push down lily bulbs that have poked up their noses over the course of the summer - they will flower better if you've got them completely underground by the middle of September as it gives them a longer dormant period - as long as the nose is in the sun, the plant doesn't bother to store nutrients which it will use to make flowers next year.

Some perennials that don't flower until June still manage to get into leaf in the border very early in the spring - as early as February in fact! This means that if need to divide them, now is the best time. Ideal candidates for September division are Aconitum (monkshood), Eremurus (foxtail lily) and some of the aqueligeas

This is also a good time to plant all evergreens, but make sure that you keep them watered for a couple of months, especially in windy weather, until they can put out new roots.

Finally start preparing new borders to be planted next year by digging them over to a few spades' depths, taking out weed roots and adding coarse, old compost or fallen leaves. If you're making a bed from what was previously lawn, lay the turf upside-down in the bottom of the bed to nourish the plants.

Autumn herbaceous border photograph by Zest-pk, used under a creative commons attribution licence