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It’s a re-post of an image from near the start of my blog (in 2018) for this week. We’re just getting back to normal here after having our new heating system installed and it’s good to be warm again. With a bit of luck I’ll be back to my garden and photography in the next few days. 🙂
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It’s a post-and-run this week because we’re getting ready for work to start tomorrow to install our new heating system. There’s a slight feeling of chaos around here right now – hopefully it will be replaced by a good feeling of warmth soon! 🙂 (And the flower is Cosmos ‘Seashells’.)
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Here’s a quick look back to wild carrot (Daucus carota) seed heads in early autumn, photographed in the light of a sunny evening.
Evening is a time I love in the garden, especially early on, while the sun is still out. It’s quiet and peaceful once the traffic of workers going home has gone, with just the occasional sounds made by a foraging bird. The light makes everything look better at this time of day.
Now the evenings are darker and those seed heads are gone. But there will be more new wild carrot plants in spring and sunny evenings will return. For now though, I’m very busy with preparations for a new central heating system being installed, so I haven’t had much time for the garden or photography. Our home has been in a state of disruption and reorganisation while we moved things around to allow the work to be done. Hopefully, all will be settled again soon and we will be warm this winter!
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There are hardly any flowers left in the garden now, so almost everything is in shades of green, with a few leaves turning yellow here and there. (There are still the purple leaves of the smoke bush in the front garden. With a bit of luck, these will turn some interesting shades of yellow and orange – if they don’t get blown off first!)
During the last week, I’ve seen a bit of colour from fruits and berries in the garden. We finished picking the fruit from our apple trees a couple of days ago…you can see the last of the fruit on our Braeburn tree above. Our other apple tree is a Cox’s Orange Pippin which had already had its fruit picked a little while ago, so the Braeburn’s apples give later colour.
Near the apples we have a holly bush. I was considering cutting it back a lot this year because it has grown somewhat tall and spindly. I’m glad I didn’t do it, because this year there are more berries on it than I’ve seen before. This means a feast for the blackbirds!
The blackbirds (which are my favourite garden bird – alongside the robin) must do quite well here. We have two grapevines, one of which is huge and shades an arbour. The blackbirds seem to be constantly in and out of this when there are ripening grapes. We only eat a few of the grapes ourselves (they don’t get very sweet), so we don’t begrudge them to the birds. There are plenty of other berries, including the orange-red berries of our rowan tree and, later on, the ivy berries. It’s just as well that we have these to distract the birds, because blackbirds are partial to apples too… 🙂
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After Storm Babet passed by, there was not a lot left in flower in the garden. The asters which had provided some late colour have mostly gone over, and the last purple-blue ones that hang on now look tattered and disheveled after all the rain.
The white scabious flower pictured above is one of the flowers that remain and it even has buds yet to open. I find that the scabious and related knautia plants do continue to produce a few flowers until late in the year if I remember to deadhead them. At this stage, any colour that remains in my garden is a bonus. If it’s something that bees and other pollinators like, it’s an even bigger bonus. Scabious is very popular with insects, so it is proving its value here.
The white-flowered plant is Scabiosa ‘Kudo White’ and the dark red one below is Scabiosa atropurpurea ‘Chile Black’. I hope that the white one will self-seed as readily as the dark scabious has. They are so attractive and long-flowering (right from the middle of summer) that I’d be happy to give them quite a bit of space in the borders.
Hmm…for some reason ‘Scabiosa’ sounds to me like something Hermione from the ‘Harry Potter’ books would say, with a deft flick of her wand. Maybe it’s a spell for filling a garden with flowers… 🙂
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It is raining, it has been raining, and there is more rain to come…
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you will probably have noticed that I frequently mention that we have a dry climate here in the east of England. Drought is something I worry about in the garden and I try not to have many plants that require moist ground.
Not raindrops but melted frost drops from last winter.
This week has felt quite strange because it has rained and rained. In fact, this summer was unusually rainy and our grass even stayed green. I’ve read that the heavier rainfall may be a part of global warming (because warm air can hold more moisture) but this does feel unexpected.
Because it has been so wet, I thought it appropriate to post some watery pictures. However, I have a confession to make…they aren’t raindrops, but drops of melted frost photographed last winter. (It has been much too wet and grey for me to want to take the camera outside.)
We have been lucky here. Storm Babet hasn’t caused much disruption. But elsewhere, especially in Scotland, people have been forced to leave flooded homes and much damage has been done. Sometimes the forces of Nature can be thoroughly alarming!
The golden oat (Stipa gigantea) looks at its best when covered in frost, even if that frost has melted.
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Autumn means that there are few flowers left in the garden here, but there is at least a splash of colour still from the asters. The bright pink one above (name unknown because it came from a friend’s garden) is almost over now. It was glorious while it lasted, but now the softer shades of pink and blue have taken over.
Honeybees were frequent visitors to these Michaelmas daisies.
The lavender-blue aster flowers have been especially popular with bees and hoverflies in the last week or so. We had a very hot and sunny spell, so the bees were out in force, making the most of the chance to find pollen and nectar before the flowers disappear. Every time I passed by these daisies, they seemed to be buzzing…a sound to make me happy!
This pink daisy seems less popular than the blue one, but still has its visitors.
It was interesting to see that there were fewer bees attracted to the pale pink asters. (I know the name of this one – Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Les Moutiers’. But I have to admit that I did a cut and paste for the name, rather than try to spell it!) Some time ago, I read that bees prefer blue and purple-blue flowers. That was probably the reason why they didn’t bother with this pink one as much.
I noticed too, that there were a lot more honeybees than bumblebees, but that won’t be surprising if there’s a hive not very far away. There were also what appeared to be a couple of tiny dark-coloured bees, but they were too quick for me to get a good look at them. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that this hasn’t been a good year for insects in the garden, so it was a pleasure to see these late flowers so busy with pollinators. Let’s hope they’re even busier next year!
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It’s the last bit of glorious weather here, so I am doing a post-and-run so that I can spend the time outside. Astrantia is still flowering in October. Its pale colours are a contrast with the dark astrantia flowers of this post.
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This year was a worrying one as far as tiny visitors to the garden went. In spring and early summer it definitely felt as if there were fewer bees and other pollinators around. Butterflies, too, seemed scarcer this year. Things improved in the later part of the summer and there were days when there were a fair number of insects around, but not as good as previous years.
Last winter was a very cold one, with much harder frosts than we usually get. Presumably, this must have made it harder for hibernating insects to make it through to spring. I’ve also read that last year’s drought didn’t help insect numbers. Hopefully the wetter summer this year will have produced an improvement.
Common Carder bee
It was a relief to see bees and butterflies appearing as the summer progressed. But there were some things that I didn’t see here, such as the Small Tortoiseshell butterfly in the photo below.
Peacock butterflies were a rare sight here too, but Red Admirals appeared in good numbers. (They are the commonest butterflies in my garden, along with the Cabbage Whites.) The largest number I saw was on a particularly sunny day, when about a dozen Red Admirals and a solitary Peacock were feasting on a buddleia. For a few warm days there were enough of them around to swirl past me whenever I walked along the path and brushed against our butterfly bushes.
Small Tortoiseshell butterfly photographed in a previous summer
There was an increase in dragonflies visiting – they have obviously become more aware of our pond. It was amusing to watch these fairly heavy creatures try to settle on the nearby stems of evening primrose, which quickly bent and swayed under their weight. To give them better lookout posts, I pushed some big birch twigs into the pots of a couple of the pond plants. I hope they appreciated them!
Although this appeared to be a poor year for insects, there are some signs of hope in the attitudes towards their welfare. I’ve noticed a lot more wild plants and food plants for bees and butterflies in garden centres and nurseries, a response to the growing interest in gardening for wildlife. And, much to my delight, our local council stopped mowing many grassy areas. This means that the green that runs in front of the houses here is being allowed to become wilder. I’m hoping that in a few years we’ll have a decent little wildlife meadow out there!
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Summer is gradually morphing into autumn here. Despite reaching the autumn equinox, the days can be sunny and warm, making it feel as if the season hasn’t yet changed. Most of the leaves on the trees and shrubs around us are still green. The red leaves here really aren’t autumnal at all – they were photographed on a visit to a garden in early August.
North American readers may recognise these gloriously-coloured leaves as belonging to Cercis (redbud), a native of their area. I believe this is Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’, which has leaves of a deep reddish-purple. (They look much more red here, because I’ve photographed them with the light shining through them. However, the two below were just starting to become a bit more red before turning to the more orange shades of autumn.)
‘Forest Pansy’ is a cultivar that I’ve seen in some of the larger gardens that I visit, but it is not common around here. I do see it available in garden centres, so maybe there will be more of these delightful trees in our area in the future. I certainly hope so! Their heart-shaped leaves are a beautiful sight, especially when the low sunlight catches them and makes them glow.
Cercis (Redbud) leaves
An update: it turns out that the comment box was black because the Orvis theme (for some weird reason) now shows the text and the box as the same colour. (It only happens if you have a white background. It works OK if your background is black.) The ‘Happiness Engineers’ were quick to help, but the only solution was to pick a different theme. (This is Libre 2.) Hope this is helpful for anyone having a similar problem. 🙂
Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature 