There is enough to be done.
I hardly consider September an autumn month, but the calendar does, so I will mention first one bit of work well worth doing. Sow a good long row of sweet-peas. Make a shallow trench and prepare it as was done in the spring, and before Nature stops all growth above ground you will have a lusty row of little plants five to six inches high. These I should stake before the winter, as a means of protection from frost and snow; and next year, a month earlier than most of your friends, you will have sweet-peas of a height, a size and profusion to make them all envious. And that is, of course, a consummation most devoutly to be wished.
Some people's autumn borders are things of great joy and beauty. Looking on the Master's profusion, I felt like the Queen of Sheba, for I expect she thought her own house and grounds a very poor show when she got back to Sheba. But I did not, like that celebrated queen, turn and bless him unreservedly. I felt more like—much more like—abusing Griggs.
Let me tell you what an autumn border can be like; not in my own poor words, but as a master-hand painted a Master's garden, and, though not my Master's garden, the description fits.
"Against the deep green of the laurels, the rhododendron and box are sunflowers six feet high, lit up each of them with a score of blooms, and hollyhocks, taller still, are rosetted with deep claret flowers and mulberry and strange old pink. Between them bushes of cactus dahlias literally ablaze with scarlet. In front are standard roses, only crimson and damask, and now in October bright with their second bloom. Hiding their barren stems, compact and solid, an exquisite combination of green and purple, are perennial asters—a single spike of them, with its hundreds of little stars, makes a noble decoration in a room—and humbler, if more vivid, companies of tritonia. Here and again are old clumps of phlox, of fervent carmine or white starred with pink, and, to my mind, of singular beauty, the rudbeckias in brilliant clusters of chrome yellow.
"Three times in the long border Japanese anemones, mixed white and terra cotta, mark noble periods in the great curve of colour; and at corresponding intervals, as you walk round, your eye catches the beautiful response, set further forward, of clumps of chrysanthemums, lemon yellow and Indian red, tiny flowers, no doubt, 'for chrysanthemums', but sweetly pretty in their profusion and artless growth. Is that enough? Well, then, for more. There are the snapdragons in every shade of snapdragon colour, and geums now making second displays of flower, and penstemons; and salvias shaded in butterfly-blue, and Iceland poppies, and the round lavender balls—like the spiked horrors which genial Crusaders wore at the end of chains for the thumping of Saracens and similar heathens—which the Blessed Thistle bears.
"Can you see this October garden at all?"[2]
[2] In Garden, Orchard and Spinney, by Phil Robinson.