Dan Pearson's top 5 plants for autumn | Fall foliage and flowers

This is Malus transitoria, the cut-leaved crab from China and this is one of my absolute favourite crab apples. It has these tiny little berries at this time of year which start out amber and as they age they then become this wonderful rich red. And what's great about these fruits is that they are perfectly sized for the birds so when they get to a certain ripeness suddenly these will be inundated with birds and these trees will be stripped and that's the whole point really of what we're planting here in terms of woody material. We want there to be this attraction to wildlife, this opportunity for good biodiversity. And the crabs have two wonderful seasons. They are the first of the crabs to come out in April. They start with the very strong pink bud and then they completely cover themselves in creamy flower and they're ahead of the other crabs like the Huperhensis, Malus Huperhensis and then of course the other apples, the culinary apples which follow on. So there's a long season with the apple tribe here and what's great about these trees is that and the reason I've chosen them for hillside is that they're very close in aesthetic to the hawthorns which have a similar size leaf or similar shape leaf actually and they they blend very well. So I've taken these up the hill and married them into a little wood we call the bottom wood where there are a lot of hawthorns and they make this beautiful transition so you really don't feel like you're imposing horticulture upon the landscape. It's much more of a connection to what's going on here in the natural landscape and not fighting it making things feel appropriate to the setting. These trees are about 12 years old and they're about half the size that they'll ultimately get so they're not a large tree. They're good for a domestic garden and they sit very nicely in a setting where you're restricted for space. This is one of my favourite Japanese wind anemones Anemone Huperhensis Splendens from China and they are an amazing group of plants the wind anemones because they take you right the way through from end of August to the very first frosts and what I like about this one in particular is that it's relatively short so it's easy to work into a planting without it overwhelming a planting they're quite vigorous plants and it's got a beautiful airy quality and the flower has an asymmetry so it feels imperfect some of the petals are darker than others and larger than others and it just feels right for this time of year when things are imperfect and beginning to go into their winter decline and I've grown them here with cultricums that grow amongst them the Casmanthium latifolium this beautiful fishtail grass and they're just creeping out from underneath the Gotagus coccinea the Scarlet Hawthorn so you get this very lovely autumn moment but it's been good since late summer so it's a terrific plant it will go into dormancy once we get frosts and then you get very pretty seed heads which I then cut back at the end of the winter and in amongst here there are snowdrops and other spring things which will cover for when they go dormant and then they come back with this beautiful fresh ground covering foliage so there's very little to worry about with these plants they're easy to look after good retentive soil a little bit of shade not too much heat and then they'll be here for many many years this is Nerini bodinei and it's a South African bulb which is perfectly hardy here as long as it's given good drainage and a nice baking in the summer I've had these plants since I was about 10 years old a neighbor gave them to me and she'd had them for many many years before and they're incredibly long-lived they don't like disturbance so once you move them and they can take a couple of years to start flowering again and then they'd really like to just develop their clumps very very slowly and almost be congested they like soil which is on the poor side so I've got them growing here under tall canopy of an old holly so the light comes in from the side and bakes them during the day and they've got dry conditions during the summer and they have fleshy strap-shaped leaves that start to come after these flowers go over at the end of November so they're winter green beautiful glossy lime green leaves throughout the winter and then they go into a state of dormancy during the summer I grow them amongst other low-growing things such as the Viola and Waldsteinia tornata and make sure that their crowns are kept clear so that the bulbs get a good baking during the summer and then they can rise above this low canopy of things that grows underneath and around them and what's interesting is that we're starting to get things like the winter flowering cyclamen starting to colonize amongst their bulbs so there's a real feeling of a little ecology developing here on this bank and these start to come up to flower at the end of September you start to see the buds and then they're in full flower during October and first part of November and will only be stopped by a hard winter freeze that comes in in November and then they go into the next transition which is starting to regrow the leaves and that's when you can lift the bulbs and divide them moving them around move them around if that's what you decide you want to do so that's the time to move them but as I say they prefer to be left undisturbed in one position and will be here could be here for 25-30 years without needing any attention this is Aster Iso Murasaki which is our latest flowering Aster in the garden and one of the few Asters which is now still called Aster they've all been divided into a number of quite complicated names which we've all had to relearn and this is from Japan and I've grown to the Millennium Forest and it has a crimped leaf which is quite distinctive and never grows any taller than this which is just about waist height maximum it's slowly clumping and will over time form a small colony but I keep it restricted by just pulling off stray runners at the springtime and what's great about this is it starts to come into flower just as most of the other Asters are beginning to go over and then we'll go right the way through often until the very end of November when it manages just to get through the first frost so it's the very last thing to be flowering in the garden and what I like about it is it's slightly mutable color so it changes as the flower ages from lighter to dark as it flowers this is Circidiphyllum japonicum the Katsura tree from Japan and areas of China it's one of my absolute all-time favorite trees and what I love about it is it's two very very distinct seasons it comes into leaf incredibly early with emerald green foliage very early in the season copper first then emerald green as it flushes out and then at this time of year it goes into this wonderful mercurial change where when the leaves drop and turn this wonderful amber color you then get the smell of burning sugar as the leaves fall to the ground which is in the air it's very difficult to locate I can smell it now where I am and it will move on the breeze short distances but it's an absolutely hypnotizing smell it's really wonderful and one of the things I've done down here by the stream is plant a little grove of them so as you walk through the grove you're in a way ambushed by this fantastic sweet smell of candy floss as the leaves start to fall in the autumn on very still damp days in the summer you can also get the smell but it has to be just the right conditions so it's something which is liberated I suppose by decomposition if you find the leaves on the ground and try and smell them you don't get the same sensation that you get as you're moving through with the perfume on the air wonderful tree tall and statuesque when it grows to maximum height 10 to 15 meters so something that you do need to find a place for multi-stemmed preferring damp conditions moist soil to keep it hydrated during the summer so not good in a dry position but somewhere that if you've got the right place for it in a little bit of shelter for the perfume and also to keep it feeling like it's hydrated enough it's a very good tree to have