Daffodil leaves should now come away with a touch, and without injury to the bulbs. Every day this month you should visit your garden with a pair of scissors, and cut off all dead flowers and all annuals that are going to seed. Not one Sweet-pea must be allowed to make a pod, and your Mignonette will have a longer flowering season if you can cut off the green seed-vessels directly they appear. Perhaps you will like some of your Love-in-a-mist to form its handsome seed-pods and sow itself for next year. One pink Canterbury Bell, too, would give you seed enough to fill a big garden; but its seedlings will probably not be pink if you have allowed blue and white ones to grow near it.
When your Lupins, Pyrethrums, and Delphiniums go out of flower, you can either cut off the flowering stems and leave the rest of the plant, or you can cut down the whole plant close to the ground. When you cut down severely you should give a little extra food in the shape of manure, bone-meal, or Clay’s Fertilizer. We did not include Pyrethrums in our short list of perennials, because they are rather capricious: easily managed in some gardens, and bad-tempered in others. Slugs devour them. If they are given to you, and you want to cut them down, do it rather gingerly, and in damp, dull weather. We are not speaking by any orthodox tradition, but out of our own experience, as we have lost many a fine clump through being told that they could be cut down sharply after flowering. In dry weather the operation kills them.
August.
The chief things to do this month are to enjoy your garden, to cut your flowers, and to keep things tidy. Pinks, Pansies, and Carnations may be increased in the ways we have explained. If you have Rose-trees of your own, or are allowed to take a few cuttings from other people’s, you should try to grow some on their own roots. We have told you how to take the cutting and how to plant it in the chapter on ‘Roses.’ The bulb lists arrive this month, and you must decide what bulbs you want for autumn planting.
September.
Your spring-flowering bulbs should be planted this month. In some cases it cannot be done, because their places are not vacant yet, or because you mean to dig over your whole garden later in the autumn. But where complete reorganization is unnecessary, try to find room for your bulbs as soon as possible.
If you have any biennial or perennial plants grown from seed sown in May, they should now be strong and big enough to transplant to their flowering quarters. This is an operation you can carry out either in autumn or spring, but not in winter. Frost soon kills plants that have not had time to take a firm hold of the soil.
Autumn brings much labour in the garden in the shape of tidying, weeding, and preparing for next year. Annuals that have become shabby may be pulled up and thrown away. They will leave a bare place that you must dig over well. Before you replant it you must consider whether what you are going to plant would like a little manure beneath its roots, or as a blanket on the top. A greedy annual has probably impoverished the soil.
Herbaceous plants that flower in spring may all be divided and reset now.