Autumn

Autumn is the season famed for it beautiful rusty ambers, bronzed reds and mustard hues and it is in full swing here at Puriri Lane @ Addenbrooke with our many deciduous trees dropping their leaves, although a stressful summer for our plants with not much water has meant an earlier than usual leaf drop. It is a great time to take inspiration and to appreciate this beautiful but fleeting colour palette because before we know it we will be heading into the cooler winter months.

The carpets of fallen leaves create that wonderful rustling sound as we wander through our gardens.  As we progress more into this beautiful season it is the time to make our home cozy for the cooler months that will soon be upon us and we have some wonderful new books that we have added to our Book Shelf which will inspire you to do just that.

Author Christiana Bellstedt Myers can show you how to create a cozy home this autumn with her beautiful new book  "The Natural Cozy Cottage.  Chris gives us one hundred ideas for creating a cozy space, you can find this lovely new book here 

I have already found some wonderful new ideas for styling our wee two bedroom cottage which I am sure my husband will be thrilled to hear about and I intend to style up seasonal displays on every available surface and this is well underway.

Handcrafting informal wreaths for the doors by attaching autumn leaves dried flowers as well as foraged berries and end of summer garden flowers is how I will be spending a few days this week. Keep an eye on our Instagram account @purirlane_addenbrooke for some of my creations. I am intending on turning our rustic potting shed area into an artful arrangement of foliage along with some of my watering can collection or perhaps I should say obsession as these also make a great vase.

Dried Poppy Heads and Grasses look wonderful in a vase

I have an old zinc tin that I have filled with all of the old summer seed heads of poppies, fennel, queen anne's lace and other annuals which arranged artfully with a few pots and a pumpkin or two takes on just the autumnal look I am wanting to achieve.

Lucy The Flower Hunter has some very dreamy ideas which will help inspire your autumnal flower styling - we have autographed copies of this book available exclusively in New Zealand to Puriri Lane @ Addenbrooke which you can find here.

The Flower Hunter - Lucy Hunter

Why not grab a cup of tea and sit down with one of our beautiful  books  and take some time out to to be inspired about your Autumn planting or flower styling

Potting Shed Tea from our tea collection

 IN THE GARDEN

Autumn is considered the best time to plant as the ground is still warm and the first of the autumn rains which seem to be finally upon us here in Auckland and around the country will help new plants, trees and lawns get established.

There are quite a few jobs on the autumn to do list and we have detailed just a few of them below

Summer flowering annuals are coming to the end of their flowering and Autumn is a good time to remove old plants and to start your preparation for your winter displays.

We are now starting to sow seeds of our perennials as well as our hardy annuals such as Cornflowers, Pansies, Calendula and Antirrhinums which will give us a strong start to the spring flowering season.

Rose gardens can start to look pretty bare when you pull out your summer flowering annuals so a great idea is to replace them with some perennials so that you will always have something beneath them.  You can read on our Garden Journal here  about companion planting with roses.  We are also going to be planting Digitalis under our roses so that they bridge the gap between our roses flowering and they will look lovely with their tall spires amongst the green foliage of the roses.

We gather up all of our autumn leaves and put them into bags for leaf litter to mulch our gardens and also put some of them through our mulching machine to add some of the essential brown elements to our compost pile.

The end of summer and start of autumn is bulb planting season! Planting bulbs in autumn allows them to get established over the winter season in time to delight you with their beautiful flowers in spring.  Planting bulbs is easy, make sure you plant your bulb in well drained soil at the correct depth for its size which is roughly twice the height of the bulb.  We have a couple of wonderful bulb planting tools which you can see here  along with some cute bird bulb markers which you can pop in where you plant your bulbs to be sure that you don't dig through them!

 Rudbeckia Goldsturm and Helenium Moerheim Beauty in our gardens

 Salvia patens Cambridge Blue with Echinacea "Mellow Yellow"

  Heuchera | Marmalade

 Autumnal leaf colour

Cones and Acorns

Autumn Pumpkins

Enjoy Autumn and keep an eye out on our website for some exciting new products that we have got arriving soon.  Thank you for your patience as we wait for all of our beautiful botanically inspired giftware from overseas... beautiful things are worth waiting for!

We are busily growing more plants which will start to become available over the coming months.  Unfortunately due to lengthy delays with seeds from overseas and such a long time in Auckland lockdown without potting mix means that some plants will not be available this season but we will have plenty of new things to inspire you.

Take care & Happy Gardening

Deb