On Thursday evening I sent you all a letter saying the clay would be soft enough to dig this weekend. On Saturday morning I put a fork in the bottom bed and it went about an inch and stopped. Instead I spent eleven minutes doing something I had not planned to do at all — and which I now think matters more than the job I failed.

"He that plants trees loves others besides himself."

— Thomas Fuller

(7 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

On Thursday evening I wrote to you and said the ground would be soft this weekend. I said Friday's rain would open a window, that clay after rain passes through a narrow band where a fork goes in and does not smear, and that Saturday morning after a night of drying would be about right.

I want to start by telling you what happened when I went out and tested that.

The fork went in about an inch. Then it stopped, the way it stops when you have hit something, except there was nothing to hit. I leaned my weight onto it in the way you do when you are alone in a garden and have decided the ground is being unreasonable. It came up in a flat plate, dark and damp on top, and the underside of that plate was the pale grey of dry clay, and dust came off it.

Two hours of rain. On ground that has been baking since the middle of July. Almost all of it had run off the surface and away down the path, and what had soaked in had gone an inch and a half and stopped.

So I was wrong on Thursday. I will come back to why in a moment, because the reason is the useful part.

But the practical position on Saturday morning was this. Job one on my own list was to move the one plant I already know is in the wrong place. In my garden that is the Alchemilla mollis (lady's mantle) along the side of the lawn, in the driest ground I own, where I have written in the past that they should not be. Last September I wrote it in a notebook.

And you cannot lift a rootball out of ground like that. There is nothing to lift. You get a fork under a clump and the soil does not come with it — the roots tear out of a solid mass that will not release them, and what you carry across the garden is a handful of damaged root and no soil at all, at the end of a summer that has already half killed the plant.

The flopped leaves are still laying on the ground next to each clump, with the labels on, where I put them a fortnight ago.

I am aware of how this looks. I need to start doing what I say.

Why the surface lies to you

Here is the thing I got wrong, and it is worth knowing because it will catch you too.

When clay dries out badly — properly dried, over weeks, until it has cracked — it does not simply become thirsty. It becomes water-repellent. The fine particles bind and the surface glazes, and the first rain that lands on it beads and runs rather than soaking. The technical word is hydrophobic, and you can watch it happen on a bare bed: the water sits in droplets for a second like it has landed on a waxed jacket, then finds the lowest point and leaves.

What that means in practice is that a heavy, short downpour on drought ground gives you almost nothing. It looks like a great deal. The beds go dark, everything glistens, the whole garden has the appearance of having drunk deeply. And two inches down it is exactly as dry as it was on Friday morning.

This is why you get the tide mark. Push a trowel in and turn it over and you will see a clean line — wet above, bone dry below — and the line is usually shallower than you want it to be.

What actually rewets baked clay is not one hard rain. It is repeated, gentle, boring rain over days. The first shower breaks the surface tension. The second gets a little further. By the third or fourth the ground has remembered how to drink, and then it takes it properly.

We had one shower. I wrote to you after one shower, with confidence, on a Thursday evening, because I wanted the weekend to be the weekend I had promised you.

Check before you commit. A trowel, a turn of the wrist, and look for the line. It takes four seconds and it would have saved me a paragraph of apology.

The plant I am actually worried about

Because I could not dig, I did the job on the list that needs no soil at all. And the plant I went to was the one I have been quietly anxious about since about the middle of August.

Salvia Amistad.

If you do not grow it: it is the tall one, near black stems, deep violet flowers with an almost black calyx behind them, and it does not stop. Mine has been in flower since June and it went through the entire drought without once looking sorry for itself, which — after the summer I have just described to you — earns a plant a great deal of goodwill in this garden.

The problem is not summer. The problem is what comes next.

Amistad is borderline hardy here. In a mild winter on free-draining soil it will sit out and come back. On heavy clay in Norfolk, in a wet winter, it is a coin toss, and it is not really the cold that kills it. It is the wet. Clay that holds water round the crown through January and February rots it out from the middle while the frost gets the blame.

And I have just watched, all summer, exactly how much water my clay can hold once it decides to. The corner by the compost bins held a puddle this year for the first time I can remember.

So I have a plant that carried the year for me, sitting in a soil type that may well kill it in the dark, and no way of knowing in advance which winter I am about to get.

That is not a problem you solve. It is a problem you hedge.

Eleven minutes

I took six cuttings on Saturday morning. This is the whole method, and it is genuinely this simple.

I looked for non-flowering shoots, which on a salvia in September takes a minute of hunting because most of it is trying to flower. Side shoots low down are your best bet. I cut about four inches, taking each one just below a leaf joint — that is where the rooting hormone concentrates naturally, and a cut below the node roots far more readily than a cut between them.

Lower leaves stripped off, so there is nothing sitting under the compost to rot. The top pair left on. If a shoot had a soft growing tip I pinched it out, so the cutting puts its energy into making roots rather than making more shoot.

Then round the edge of one pot — five or six to a pot, close to the side, because they root better near the wall where there is a bit more air and a bit less wet. The compost was half multipurpose, half grit. Sharper than you think you need. Salvia cuttings rot far more often than they fail to root, and almost every failure I have had was a compost that held too much water.

Watered once, properly. Then onto the kitchen windowsill, bright but out of direct sun, and now I leave them alone. No bag over the top for salvias — they resent the humidity and rot. Two to four weeks and there will be roots.

Eleven minutes. Which happens to be exactly how long it took me to mark out next to the Alchemilla mollis a fortnight ago, and I notice that the eleven-minute jobs are the ones that keep actually getting done.

The part I want you to take away

Now here is the thing I have been circling.

Most of those six cuttings will not be needed.

If we get a kind winter, the parent plant will sit out in the border and come back in May and I will have six young Amistads and nowhere obvious to put them. I will give some away over the fence. One or two will sulk on a shelf until I feel bad enough to plant them somewhere unsuitable.

And that is not the cuttings failing. That is the cuttings working.

I think we misunderstand what we are doing when we take them. It feels like propagation — free plants, more stuff, the pleasure of getting something for nothing. And it is that, a bit. But that is not the reason to do it in September.

The reason to do it in September is that you are buying the right to be wrong about the winter.

Last Monday I wrote to you about planning — about walking the garden with a pencil while the evidence is still standing, about how a plan made in September beats one made in January because it is made in front of the truth. I stand by all of it. But a plan, however honest, is still a bet on things going roughly the way you expect.

Cuttings are the opposite instinct. Cuttings assume you are going to be wrong. They assume there will be a February you did not forecast, a plant you were sure of that does not come back, a corner of the garden that turns out to hold water you did not know it could hold.

You need both. The plan is what you do when you are right. The cuttings are what you have when you are not.

And the cost of the hedge is eleven minutes, one pot, and a windowsill. That is the entire premium. If the winter is kind you have wasted eleven minutes. If it is not, you still have the plant that carried you through the worst summer in years.

I know which way round I would rather be wrong.

One more thing

Cody came in while I was doing it and wanted to know why I was cutting bits off a plant that was still flowering. Which, put like that, is a fair question and took some answering.

I told him they were spares. In case the big one does not come back.

He thought about it for a while and asked whether we could do one for his sunflower.

I explained, as gently as I could manage, that sunflowers do not work like that — that it is an annual, that it has one year and then it is done, and that the way you keep a sunflower is to keep its seeds rather than a piece of the plant.

He has gone away to think about that and I do not think either of us is finished with it.

There are plants you can hold onto in pieces, and plants you can only hold onto as seed, and years you cannot hold onto at all. Six of these, on a windowsill in September, is about as close as gardening gets to an argument with that.

The Surface Is Not the Soil. After a long dry spell, one heavy rain wets the top inch and runs away with the rest. The garden looks transformed and almost nothing has changed underneath. Check with a trowel before you commit a weekend to digging, and expect baked clay to need three or four soakings before it drinks properly again. I did not check, so I learned a lesson.

Insurance Is Not Pessimism. Taking cuttings does not mean you expect the plant to die. It means you have accepted that you cannot forecast February from September, and you have decided to make that not matter. Eleven minutes and one pot of gritty compost buys you the right to be wrong about the winter, which is a thing worth owning.

The Jobs That Get Done Are the Small Ones. I have failed to move the Alchemilla mollis three times in the last few years. In the same period I have put canes next to them, taken six cuttings, and connected a water butt — all jobs of roughly ten minutes. The size of a task is a better predictor of whether it happens than how much you care about it. Write next year's plan accordingly.

Gary Stewart writes twice a week from a small garden and an allotment on Norfolk clay.

Mondays are for what the garden has already done. Thursdays are shorter, because the weekend is the point and the reading is not.

No expertise, no ideal garden, just what the soil taught him that week.