Pink and orange

Autumn is always thought of as a time of golds and russets.  There's certainly gold (orange and yellow) in my garden at the moment, but the main colour, such as it is, seems to be pink.  Pink and orange is not a colour combination that I favour, though fortunately there are few places where the two appear close together; and in the softer light of autumn, the colour clash doesn't seem quite so garish. 

Nerine bowdenii

The nerines are starting to flower; they're flamboyant blooms, lipstick-pink and parading their finery at a time of year when most plants are winding down or fading away.  Nearby is a pot with a few last orange marigolds, but those are tucked away in a corner and not very visible from most angles.  

Cosmos bipinnatus 'Dazzler'

Another strong pink in the garden is the bed of Cosmos bipinnatus 'Dazzler' which has bloomed strongly for a few months now and is still providing some cut flowers for the house; I've managed to save seed from it to sow again next year.

Dahlia 'Bishop of Canterbury' - I think!

Dahlia 'David Howard'

The dahlias are recovering from their rather dry summer (pots insufficiently watered in the heat!) and are gradually starting to flower again.  The pink one which I think is 'Bishop of Canterbury' - although online searches suggest that 'B of C' is a rather variable variety so it might not be - is dominating the patio along with D. 'David Howard', which is a nicely soft shade of orange.  The two get along not too badly together.

Orange-berried pyracantha

Rudbeckia

As I've said before, this has been a spectacular fruit year, and the firethorn (pyracantha) on the north wall of the house has berried profusely - orange, of course.  And the yellow rudbeckia is also in full splendour.

The 'pink and orange' combo is at its peak in the berries of the spindle tree, Euonymus europaeus 'Red Sentinel'; the seed cases haven't opened yet, and only the pink outer is visible, with the orange berries still tucked up inside.

Spindleberries

Fruit of the season

A combination of wet weather and having other things to do kept me from checking on the garden for a couple of days, but this morning a foray down the veg patch and into the greenhouse produced a good handful of tomatoes and some fair sized courgettes.  The courgette 'British Summertime' hasn't done so well this year; as its name suggests, it is supposedly bred to fruit well in our summer weather, but we haven't had a typical summer this year and perhaps it has been too hot for it!  'Defender' continues to do well, however; I need to buy more seed for next year and 'Defender' will definitely be on my shopping list.

Down by the compost corner, several impressive clumps of toadstools have suddenly appeared in the grass.  I said in a recent post that the little solitary toadstool found in the lawn looked fairy-like; these ones are more for goblins, I think.  Fruit, but definitely not edible, and rather sinister-looking!

I made the most of a couple of dry days to get on with attempting to clip the long hedge into some sort of order.  I haven't cut the top for a couple of years; it involves balancing on the top of the ladder and hacking away with the extending shears, and last year there were too few dry days to do that.  There's still work to be done, but we're getting there.  One of the robins was obviously concerned that I was going to destroy his roosting place; he kept a close eye on what I was doing.  There's plenty of hedge left for him to hide in.

Greening up

It's strange for the garden to be turning greener at this time of year, rather than going brown; but the recent rain, some of it heavy, has encouraged plants to get a second wind.  The courgettes have started producing again, and the lawn is now looking more like itself than it has for a few months.  The rain has occasionally been accompanied by thunder, and together those have kept me indoors at times, but some dry spells in the past few days have allowed me to get outside.  Jobs have included making a start on cutting the long hedge (big leylandii, some too big for me to reach the back) - a layer of cardboard has been put down covering the path alongside the trees, and this is being gradually covered by the clippings as a weed suppressant.  For the time being I've left the ivy that is flowering through the leylandii in parts, to provide nectar for the insect population; a couple of years ago we had a great many red admiral butterflies enjoying it.

Male common blue butterfly

- with wings open

Butterflies have done better this year, and they continue to come to the garden; this week's spot was a male common blue which was around for a couple of days.

Birds are also about, albeit in smaller numbers in the moulting season; a robin has been showing interest in my hedge clipping.  Aside from the wild birds, young pheasants and red-legged partridges, brought in by a local estate for shooting, flock regularly in the field beyond us and occasionally wander in.  One day 20 partridges filed through the garden and stood on the summerhouse veranda for a bit until I gently moved them on (the summerhouse door was open and, although they weren't looking as though they were going to explore inside, I thought it best to discourage them from any such thought). 

One day I found a little toadstool in the lawn; a few hours later it had entirely disappeared.  I can see how they came to be associated with the fairies.

Autumn, suddenly

After a much warmer than usual summer, suddenly it’s autumn.  On the second-last morning of August for the first time this year we had condensation on the outside of the bedroom windows – always a sign of the cooler weather kicking in.  The fourth heatwave was a bit of an anticlimax; one or two warm days, but then a chilly wind from the east cooled things down considerably, and I did briefly consider putting on my winter gardening jacket one afternoon.  A few showery days turned to more persistent rain, and this week is more wet than not.  It’s all good for the garden, which desperately needs any rain it can get.

Apple and plum trees

The leaves of the plum tree are always the first to turn, and it makes a striking contrast with the big apple tree next to it, with its still-green leaves and huge fruit.  The early eating apples are much smaller but also plentiful (sadly, they aren’t good keepers); several houses in the village are giving their fruit away as there is so much.

Autumn and winter veg is starting to appear in the kitchen garden: leeks, winter cabbage, radicchio, pak choi, hardy herbs, in addition to the sprouting broccoli and kale that have been growing for several weeks now.  There are still some French beans, and I planted out a few little lettuce seedlings today, into a surprisingly warm soil, for a late crop.  There’s a row of carrots and some beetroot that need to be dealt with, and the courgettes are still limping along; and in the greenhouse the tomato crop has been good.

We have set up a bird table near the summerhouse, and the robin who lives down there has been enjoying having food put out for him (or her).  But it’s that time of year when birdlife seems to go quiet; perhaps some of the residents are already starting to migrate to warmer parts of the country or they’re moulting and staying in hiding.  A fatball put out a couple of days ago has gone untouched, and there are now only two or three sparrows coming to the patio for food whereas a couple of weeks ago we had nearly 20 at a time.  After two or three months away, Lefty the lame woodpigeon returned the other day to poke around one of the flowerbeds; we hope he’ll stay for the winter.

There are a few butterflies still about; a small copper was resting today on the winter savory.

Small copper butterfly

Feast or famine II

Apart from a showery spell a couple of weeks ago, the weather has continued dry (we’re now in Heatwave 4, although the past few days have been more cloudy and breezy than hot).  The garden is parched, and although little has died prematurely in the veg plot, nothing is actually growing very much.  I have some seedlings (radicchio, cima di rapa, a late cabbage or two) ready to go out, and will have to water assiduously to keep them alive.  There are warnings that vegetable supplies may be impacted, and that, because berries and other wild fruits are appearing early, wildlife may run short of food this autumn and winter.  Although I've been picking blackberries across the lane, I'm happily leaving a good number for the birds and other denizens of the hedgerow.

Pears ,,,

,,, and apples

It has been an excellent fruit year.  The plum crop (now long gone or laid down as preserves, see below) was large, the apples are prolific and we have a few of the best pears our two little trees have ever produced.  Even the fig, in its over-shady position, has done well.  Down at the bottom of the garden, the wild damson trees – probably suckers from the plum tree, which was probably grafted onto a damson rootstock – rarely produce enough fruit for us to bother with; the fruit is small and very sour, and really only fit for use in flavouring liqueurs, in the manner of sloe gin, and you need a fair quantity of them to do that.  This year, though, there’s a good number of them.  We recently unearthed a long-forgotten bottle of home-made damson gin in the cellar, 2011 vintage, which has turned out to be delicious with its 14 years of bottle age.  There’s a bottle of cheap gin in the house, bought so that we could preserve some of the plums, so the rest of it has gone to make more damson gin.  I doubt if we’ll manage to keep it for 14 years though!

Damsons - ready for the gin!

I had carefully netted my cabbages to prevent butterflies from laying their eggs on them.  In the end, it has been the dry weather that has finished off the cabbages rather than the butterflies, helped by the presence of a red ant nest in the soil of that bed.  When I passed by yesterday, there was a frantic fluttering under the netting – a wren had somehow got in there and was trapped.  How did it manage that?  I lifted the netting and let it out, and it flew off with a loud chirp.  The netting was put back in place.  Later on, I passed by again, and – there, under the netting, was the wren.  So I let it out again.  And later still – yes, the wren was back.  I gave up and left the netting half off the bed, but still lying on its supports; the remains of the cabbages are so unappealing that no butterfly is likely to lay eggs on them.  The wren spent several hours in its little tent, fluttering busily around and apparently picking something (flies?) off the underside of the net; this morning, at breakfast time, it was in there again, working hard at finding whatever is attracting it.  Perhaps it’s feeding itself up in anticipation of a hard winter?

Freebies

I admit to being a bit lazy about weeding – but sometimes I deliberately leave a weed seedling to see what develops, and occasionally it’s worth it.

The edge of the gravel drive usually has a good number of ‘unintentional’ plants seeded into it.  A few are desirable – nigella and parsley, from plantings in the adjacent bed – but a lot are not.  There’s a good number of out-and-out weeds, but also a few buddleja plantlets.  My buddleja is a big old thing, with flowers in a reasonably good purple-blue, though there are better modern cultivars and I’m not inclined to propagate this one, even though it seeds itself quite a lot in this garden - I use the old seedheads and prunings in the compost bins and plants germinate from that.  Recently quite a large buddleja plant appeared in the gravel, and I haven’t bothered to pull it up – in the hope that it might flower, and (irrationally) turn out to be a better colour than the existing plant. 

White buddleja

It has indeed flowered – and it’s white!  Probably a seedling of next door’s white buddleja plant.  I’m hoping that it might be transplantable, with a little care; most weeds in the gravel don’t have deep roots, and there’s no obvious reason why this would be any different.  I’ll leave it until the late autumn and try to move it then; with a lot of watering and decent conditions, it might survive.  Then I need to decide where to put it (not many good places for it …)!

Panicum flowerhead

Another ‘unintentional’ plant is in the pot with Hosta ‘Krossa Regal’.  At first it looked rather like the young hosta leaves, and I paid it little attention, but as it developed I realised that it’s a grass.  Not just any grass; it has broad, chunky leaves.  A panicum seedling.  The only panicum that I’ve had in the garden is one of the cultivars with an explosion of little seedheads, rather like a miniature firework, which looks good in flower arrangements, so I left it alone.  The first flower-head went into a little vase with some dahlia flowers and a few sprigs of Dianthus ‘Siberian Blues’ (which is actually pink …), and it looked good on the table for a celebratory weekend!

Seed gathering

I mentioned in a recent post that my peas had dried up while we were on holiday.  I harvested the dry pods, from varieties ‘Early Onward’ and ‘Douce Provence’, anyway, looking for peas to sow next year – and found that nearly all the pods had suffered pea moth damage.  Not a pretty sight.  There were a few peas that were unaffected, and, making the best of a bad situation, I’ve saved them for future use – and put the pea moth caterpillars out on the patio for the blackbirds and sparrows to feast on.  Interestingly, the climbing pea ‘Alderman’ was less affected, at least by the moths, although there had been damage from the sparrows perching on the climbing frame to eat the flowers!  I was able to salvage some broad bean seeds from the early bean plants, again for sowing next year; these were variety ‘Aguadolce Claudia’, although I also grow later-cropping ‘Imperial Green Longpod’ and broad beans cross-pollinate, so these seeds may not produce plants that are suitable for very early sowing.  In any case I’ve decided that autumn-sown broad beans aren’t worth the trouble in this garden, and sowing them in late winter should give me reasonable results.  We’ll see.

Peas and beans

The earliest-sown lettuces are setting seed in the veg plot, and I’ll collect some from them when they’re ready.  The radicchio plant is still in flower, but looking at the old flowerheads I can’t see usable seed; maybe I need to look more closely!  However a couple of dill flowers with seed are drying off well in the greenhouse.

Dill flowers drying off

Having started on seed-collecting, I’ve been going round other plants that I’d like to propagate.  Last year the weather was too wet and cold for viable seed to be produced; my favourite Cosmos ‘Xanthos’ flowered, but the seedheads were too wet to do anything with, and I ended up buying a new packet of seeds.  This year I’ve collected and dried a nice little envelope-full of fresh seed, and am having a go at doing the same with the tall pink variety C. bipinnatus ‘Dazzler’ that has been brightening up the old herb bed.  The ‘Xanthos’ seedheads ripened nicely in the dry of the greenhouse, and I’m hoping ‘Dazzler’ will do the same.

Cosmos bipinnatus 'Dazzler'

I liked the pink corncockle plants in the rather experimental wildflower patch (most of which has now flowered and died off), and have picked some seedheads in the hope of growing more next year, in a flowerbed among ‘proper’ plants, where they won’t look too out-of-place.  Likewise I’ve gathered seed from the calendula and cornflower plants in the tulip pot.  

I’m on a bit of a roll.  Next up will be to take cuttings of other plants for next year!

Following on from the views we’ve been enjoying from the summerhouse, the fox has been back in the field again, possibly in search of the juvenile pheasants which are roaming the countryside at the moment.  When we spotted a cat hunting in the field, then making a hasty retreat towards our garden, we thought that the fox was on its trail – until we noticed a young pheasant determinedly pursuing it through the grass.  The cat presumably wasn’t taking any chances with that big beak.