Your Garden - Wrapping Up Warm

‘As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens’ is one of those faintly irritating sayings from bygone days. Like most country saws, there was a lot of truth in it. Unless you live in the Scottish highlands, you are unlikely to experience a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures until the year has turned, and the days are lengthening. So now is the time to think about protecting those outdoor plants that are not absolutely bone-hardy.

Many people believe that this is one task too many in the garden, and that plants must take their chance; either they will die, in which case you replace them with something different and potentially more interesting, or else they survive and you will have been justified in doing nothing.

But there are plenty of plants on whose survival I really do not wish to gamble. Apart from anything else, I find I can never depend on acquiring a plant a second time around. Most gardens will contain one or two slightly tender plants, which may suffer every year, even if only by way of frosted young leaves in spring. And there are herbaceous plants, which we don’t want to dig up each autumn and preserve indoors, such as dahlias, Salvia patens and Cosmos atrosanguineus.

Bubble wrap is almost ideal because, being transparent, it lets the plant continue to receive some light. It’s important not to wrap it tightly round the plant, which must be allowed to transpire without becoming sweaty and fungus-prone and, ideally, to photosynthesise once dormancy ends in the spring. Bubble wrap is also ideal for wrapping around inexpensive terracotta pots that are prone to frost-shattering. The growing medium in containers freezes more easily than soil in the border, so the roots of even hardy plants in pots are vulnerable to frost damage in cold spells.

In the past, dry straw and dried bracken were popular winter insulators, placed round a plant, loosely wrapped round and secured with hessian. Neither is easy to come by now, and hessian isn’t cheap. You can still get it from Nutscene, for example, online.

For small plants, much the best material is spun ‘fleece’. Easy to get hold of, not expensive, and excellent for protecting the crowns of tender perennials, such as Salvia patens, because it can be cut to size and held down with pegs or by soil heaped on its edges. It can also be laid in more than one layer in severe weather. It is also ideal for throwing over a small plum or peach tree in flower, or a vulnerable hydrangea, if frost is forecast in early spring.

You can buy fleece jackets to slip over containers. Haxnicks supply them in three sizes. They also sell designer-print fleece jackets in ‘Autumn Leaf’, ‘Snowflake’ and ‘Green Leaf’.

Fleece can be a bit flimsy for windswept places, easily blown away if not well secured. It rarely lasts more than two seasons, but is so easy to handle that it takes the hard work out of winter protection. In a hard winter, that could be the difference between life and death.

So in the words of another irritating saying from my childhood, ‘wrap up warm or you won’t feel the benefit’.

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