00:00This is the perfect time of year to rearrange your garden. It's not just a question of getting an even spread of plants, like the forget-me-nots, and that certainly applies to any of the biennials, but also it's a brilliant time to plant trees and shrubs and hedges, and if you've got established plants that you love, many of them, particularly hardly perennials, can all be divided and now is the best time to do it.
00:29For example, I've got here a hardy geranium. This is geranium nodosum, and it's really good in slightly shady places, flowering from early summer right through into autumn.
00:46What I'm trying to do is get as much of the root ball up as possible, rather than divide it whilst it's still in the ground.
00:59We always used to think this was a job best done in February, March, maybe even April, but with climate change, October and November is the sweet spot.
01:11There you have the roots.
01:14Now, you can see the roots are pretty fibrous.
01:18They're not great thick roots burying themselves down in.
01:21There are lots of smaller roots, which makes them easy to divide and easy to move.
01:26It is worth pointing out that we've had pretty much constant rain for the last two weeks.
01:30And it's soaked in maybe two inches in places, but it's still very dry underneath.
01:34It's going to take a really wet winter and hopefully a wet spring to get us back to recover from the drought that we had this summer.
01:43Okay, I'm going to divide it with my spade.
01:49With a smaller geranium, you can pull them apart.
01:52With this one, I just want to divide it, put half back, and then have a substantial plant that I can put elsewhere.
01:59This can go back into the same hole, and I can guarantee that by this time next year it will have grown as big again.
02:13If I give that a good soak and a mulch, it won't even know it's been moved.
02:20It's probably the best advice to cut them back hard.
02:24Any perennial that you move, cut it back hard after moving, and that means that the roots are doing less work whilst they're growing themselves.
02:33However, geraniums are tough, and there's still some flowers on it.
02:37So in this case, I'm going to break the rules slightly and just leave it alone.
02:41What I do want to do now is plant the other half and find a home for that.
03:00Anything you move at this time of year, even if it's been raining for days and days, give it a good soak.
03:06The roots will then get established before the plant dies right back.
03:11And then next spring, you'll have a much better root system able to cope with drought if it comes.
03:20All this work is geared towards making the garden look as good as possible next spring and summer.
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