Fall Maintenance at the Garden

Fall Maintenance is one of our favorite seasonal rituals. It takes hard work to ensure our Garden is beautiful and healthy year-round. Are you wondering what the gardeners are doing at Leach Botanical Garden? Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the maintenance supporting the Garden you love. 

Fall Leaf Cleanup

This fall, we have been treated to misty mornings, cool fall air, and an incredible array of autumn colors. We basked in deep reds, fiery oranges and glowing yellows. Now, as the days get shorter and those leaves fall to the ground, we transition into our annual leaf cleanup. 

The way we address fallen leaves affects pollinators, soil quality, and the future health of our plants. Letting leaves lie in place would be the most ecological move, but as a public garden, we have to balance both aesthetic and ecological needs. We like to keep the pathways, the main entrance, and the manor house tidy. But in plant beds and in the wilder areas like the forest and by the river, we leave the leaves in place. In our wilder areas, layers of damp leaves insulate tender plants and shelter the insects and pollinators that our flowers rely on. Leaf decay is a key component to the rich, dark soil that makes our plants thrive.

Maple Pruning

With plants beginning to shut down for winter, fall is a great time to prune maples. Our gardeners spent time carefully pruning our 60+ year old laceleaf maple (Acer palmatum var. dissectum) in November, which is located in the Back 5 part of the garden. It’s a truly impressive specimen with curvy branches, cascading foliage, and a flaming red-orange fall color. Japanese maples self prune, meaning they let branches they aren’t using die off. This made it easy for our gardeners to identify branches to prune and snap off. They used their hands to snap the dead twigs since many japanese maples dislike the touch of metal pruners. 

Bulb Planting

Fall is also an ideal time to plant bulbs. This November, we planted dreamy white daffodils (Narcissus ‘Ice Baby’), whimsical purple alliums (Allium ‘Powder Puff’ and Allium giganteum), and 150 new snowdrops that will be bursting with life come February and March. You can find these in the Pollinator Garden, the Rock Garden, and the Far Meadow. We plant bulbs in the fall so they can get a head start building their root system before they emerge in the spring. 

As we plan for year-round garden interest, flowering bulbs really help span the final winter months with February and March blooms. Planning for diverse blooms ensures there’s always something colorful and interesting to admire. Come February, look out for hundreds of spritely little snowdrops poking through the snow and announcing the beginning of spring.

Images: Alison Grover