MUCK COMETH, AUTUMN IS HERE?

Saturday and the ladies who have the horse paddock (and two horses) next to the house have arranged for two small trucks of well rotted horse manure to be dumped outside the cattle grid on the grass banking.

Hooray!

R has been down the garden and cleared and weeded the asparagus and rhubarb beds - this is a before image on the right, after on the left - now I will need to get a-mulching, so a-mulching I will go - but not today as it is a bit cold and I cannot be bothered.

The garden is full of autumn colours -

 

Yes, leaves, euonymus, Virginia creeper and a livid red Hypericum but also nasturtiums not yet assassinated by a frost.

All in all the place does not look too bad but leaves need to be blown off paths and mown off lawns. Mowing is a very effective way to collect leaves fallen on grass.

I might prattle on about successes but I have to admit to one failure, yet again. These are my flowerless sweet peas same as last year. It has got so bad I have already sown some for next year in deep pots and put them down in the Wendy House. Now all it needs is a lot of prayer and someone up there to take pity on me and tell the peas to get on with it. 

It is pleasing when you find someone has found this endless diatribe of mine - but then I think, 'When do I stop?' I suppose the answer might be when I stop (or become incapable of spouting away like a flock of starlings.) It is not often I go back and read any of it, perhaps I should - why? This is the 823rd blog, maybe I will stop when I get to 1000 (if I get to 1000).

The day is grey, hardly a breath of breeze, cold, well 8C, but colder in a penetrating sort of way. I get out the blower and clear leaves from the paths, then go in and lay the woodturner for later on.

A bird has got into the shed and is trying to escape through the window. I think it is a chaffinch but it drops behind the racks of pots and I cannot find it - so leave the door open and trust it to find its own way out.

Cutting back the geraniums has given a new, albeit smaller, flush of flowers. 

One surprise concerns the garden golden rod which we normally hack back to the ground after flowering. This year R just dead headed them. No second flush of flowers but the autumn colour, especially the red stems, is wonderful.

There is also colour in surprising places - the dying hosta leaves have a special beauty. (I should mention that the spell checker did not like costa and persisted in changing it  to Costa! It is a sad world. In the pots by the back door - the one at the side - the violas are doing well. We changed to these small dainty flowers from winter pansies and these are much preferable. Notes made mentally for next year - violas everywhere?

Sunday evening and a grey cold outlook. We have walked the woods at Conishead admiring the colouring of the maples and trod the shingle by the shore. This is the great Conishead Oak taken in 1985 (apologies to the boys) before it lost a huge limb in a storm. It is the oldest tree in the park there. It makes all one does seem rather temporary.

Monday and rain is due but I manage to mow the lawns at last, not the wood. This clears the leaves from the grass and is an easy way of collecting them before using them as mulch under shrubs and on the compost heap. This is the the rose Golden Showers, one of two we have but now this one looks moribund - do not know why.

A delivery has come from Sarah Raven, lots of orange and purple tulips and some glorious white camassias. The problem now is where to put them. Perhaps if I move the Sweet Cicely from the back bed to the wood the tulips could go there? I will have to think about the camassias. In the end I have a big pot pot with a scraggy senecio in it - no longer - 40 tulips in one big pot waiting for the spring.

Walked part of Levens Hall Park yesterday in excellent company through the magnificent old trees. Acorns, beechnuts and sweet chestnuts falling on our heads, Fallow deer and Bagot goats grazing, a heron by the Kent.

The gardener is here working his wonders, strimming the fall of the stream from the wood, digging up the Aesculus indica from the lawn - it has only grown to 3 feet high in 13 years. He has bagged it up and will take it for someone else. He has fork tined a lot of the soggy patches of grass.

A dismal morning and then the sun came out briefly - the view from the kitchen door.

Finally I have to recommend Dara McAnulty's delightful book Diary of a Young Naturalist. It is so good to see the world so clearly through other eyes, and such wise ones.