A SHAKE OF THE HEAD

 The cardoon is assailed and ailing, beset with aphids and stunted. The wilder garden is too wild and after the rain flattened grass. 

The buddleia is out with bees and butterflies - painted ladies, red admirals, small tortoiseshells and gatekeepers not to mention various whites so I won't. 

And there are bursts of colour here and there and in one or two other places.

Though there are a few of the essential whites.

The pond is a dance hall for damselflies even though there is still little water in the stream - there are a few mole hills in there though.

And we have some fruit - a few greengages and apples but loads of plums, pears and damsons.

One colour that I am not enraptured by is pale mauve pink -

 

Acanthus (very prickly)(in fact a vicious plant) and the lace cap hydrangea at the woodland edge.

So, at least, we have bearable temperatures as long as I have my fleece.   

I cannot see why people are expressing surprise - we have been warned for years that if the politicians did not get their act together this would happen - and it has! It is probably too late to do much (except move to Iceland.)

As a bit of a fogey I am not too worried for myself but for young people this might be a nightmare? Time to make selfishness illegal?

Some chance.

LIFE IS A LOAD OF HORSE MANURE

Delivered this week outside the cattle grid, well rotted, fine stuff. We have already started spreading the good news - well, good for the starving plants. Cow is better and not so full of weed seed but this is well gone so we hope for the best. Anyway we should have good rhubarb next year.

R is forking away like mad, wielding the wheelbarrow with a will.

Doc does not seem to mind the new covering on the poppy bed.

So photos of the garden in all its glory, well, not quite, to the right before they poured the raft and below after and after the rain came with water on the top of the concrete slab. My old rose bed does not look too good now and the path around the front of the house is somewhat chewed up despite sheets of plywood on top of it.











The weather has turned wild with storm Diana hunting us down on Thursday. 

Cannot go out in the garden for fear of the cock pheasant coming over and begging for sunflower seed.

We have our own infinity pool on top of the concrete and the pond is redolent with reflections now the water lilies have sunk from sight. There still are a few flowers in the garden if one searches - roses, the fatsias and this feverfew.

 In the house the gerbera, Transvaal daisy,  I forgot to put in the garden, is flowering in the kitchen window but the rest are hunkering down for winter - though the good old orchid has sprung a new flowering stem.

I have picked up sticks from the wood - R will not do it - "There's no need and anyway more will come down" - but if left the whole place will become a tangle and a mess. In heaps they can be havens for wildlife - like hedgehogs (if we had any).

Small birds are eating us out of house and home. Counted 9 tits on the feeders and 8 chaffinches, two sparrows and a dunnock on the ground beneath this morning.

So I sip my tea, eat a ginger biscuit and gawp at the mess the world is getting itself into - is Trump real? What does Putin have over him that Trump never criticises him? After all the Brexit stress and cost are we going to end up still in the EU? David Miliband for PM? Personally anyone but Corbyn and anyone in the Tory Party, SNP, DUP, etc - far too many TLAs (three letter abbreviations in use.)

It will be a relief to get back to little stuff - like global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

Let's end with a poem that has nothing to do with anything but the underlying essence of the universe - 

FIBONACCI

I

wonder

about the

mystery of the

magic Fibonacci numbers.

Can they be thought of as originating from God

or are they something fundamental underpinning the structure of the universe?

Blake,

to see

a world in

a grain of sand and

a heaven in a wild flower,

where the whorls of sepals, petals in the perianth

all perpetuate the series, so begin - one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one . . .

And

on and

on and on - 

mathematical

symmetry symbolising what?

Thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine - get the series?

We did adding-up like this at the end of my junior school education - sums.

And

someday 

someone will 

summon the thought that 

somewhere there’s a fundamental

truth in Fibon

acci num

bering

?.

GLOBAL WHATEVERING?

Plants that flower in July are flowering now amongst the beginning of the autumn colour. It can only be due to the early hot summer and drought postponing flowering. Is global whatevering having an effect?

The eucryphia is finally out as is the potentilla - I have seen this out elsewhere too.

As for autumn colour the Acer sango kaku and the euonymus are an eyeful. (Is the Greek language responsible for so many plants having Latin names beginning with eu? Or is this a subtle ploy by the European Union to infiltrate British gardening?)

Wonderful weeds? After the Thornapple, now removed to the weed heap in the far garden, I have been pulling up Ragweed. I suppose it must have come from the bird seed but was several yards away and anyway we only have sunflower seed, never and peanuts not mixed seed.
We have enough with bindweed and gout weed (ground elder)(thank the Romans for that one), couch grass and horsetails.

We have, at last, roses in flower in the new bed. The orange one was given to us by I and L.

Now my pal Mr. Pheas is becoming more tame and, if he sees me topping up the bird feeders, he comes running and stands a couple of yards away in hopeful anticipation.

 On the other hand - "What shall we do for lunch dear? Let's pop down to the garden shed and see if we can chew through the wires of the peanut feeder."

Now to something a bit disturbing - no not Trump, Putin or even Boris - The black bootlaces of Honey Fungus are alive and well in the garden. The toadstools have appeared along a fifteen foot length of hedge under the sallow, around the bottom of the eucalyptus and around one of the lovely white birches.

Now, I know they are edible but I am not very tempted. All we can do is wait and hope the trees are strong enough to withstand the fungus.

Finally autumn is with us. mellow stuff and fruitfulness - and colour so here is a taster for the next blog when I will try and get some more photos of the autumn colours before they get blown away.

WINDING DOWN

To start here is an example of negative phototropism! The orchid roots are growing away from the light - not important just a curiosity?

The swallows and martins are gone.

I have trimmed various shrubs like sarcococcus and rosemary into neat balls. And a box in a pot. I was surprised to see how much box balls were in the garden centres - perhaps a little earner there for someone?

It seems to rain every night and sometimes every day, pools on paths and it is imperative to stay off the grass. Two new areas have appeared where there is standing water and I wonder if old underground pipes or sumps have blocked. More digging ahead.

Some of the sycamores have grey rather than black spots on the leaves. I think this is due to Cristulariella depraedans, a fungal growth.


We are into our first autumn sunsets and the light is definitely less bright. I heard today that the last five years have been some of the wettest on record - I can well believe that - global whatting?

 The stream is full and we have new springs all over the place.

There is still colour in the garden, here the blue salvia Sue gave us before she died and the white cosmos that has turned out to be pink!
The orange oriental poppy is also flowering again.

 We have Bramley apples to our eyeballs - well you know what I mean - a bumper crop. People keep asking me if I want some apples and I have to keep politely declining their offer. However S did take me up on two rhubarb crowns, now delivered.

I have underplanted the big magnolia with crocus shown here. (The little house was made for us by my late brother-in-law Roy.)
I am hoping that they will spread naturally and form a colourful swathe in the spring.

As you can see we are losing the leaves off the ash trees - and we are losing dead twigs and branches in recent gales - it is stick picking up time again.

Flowers are not the only colour in the garden as some of the shrubs are beginning to turn.

R has suggested I get in the pond and trim the water lily back as it is getting too large, however, as I do not have waders and the water will be very COLD I am hesitating!

I have begun to clear and dig over the veg bed, just removing weeds and forking the top surface before a dressing of compost. Then it will be ready for the plants I have to move from by the house for the new extension - whenever that happens. I have not yet worked out where I am going to put all these plants - a new flowerbed - there might be some opposition to that!

And finally we went to Ford Park Apple Day in Ulverston today and took our remaining apples - shown here after washing. They juiced them and now we have some juice in the freezer and some in jars with the lids loose to ferment to cider. 
The tops were not screwed on tightly - I remember as a boy my brother making marigold champagne and the bottles exploding.

QUIRKS AND BLOSSOM

Quirks first - lots of lovely spring flowers like these calendulas - they overwintered and are flowering! There is also lots of seed around where I failed to dead head so . . .? R has been at the daffs doing a stirling job dead heading them as they go over so they can get ready for next year. Yesterday I judged at the Rusland Spring Show - the arts section! Ok with photos, paintings and poems but felt hats and Ruskin Lace, I have to admit, are not my forte.

Another oddity is that we have bluebells in flower - early - two weeks early this year. Is this the sign of changing seasons with climate change? Though we are enjoying a few days of sun overall, the changing weather has become colder and WETTER.

To the blossom itself, loads of it - only hope the odd frost doesn't mean no fruit - damsons to start -

Prunus shirotae

Great white cherry

Victoria plum

Amelanchier

Pyrus salicifolia pendula - the weeping silver pear (very thorny).

I have been a-hoeing as the sycamore has inundated the garden with seedings - everywhere including in the grass. One of the snags with having an, albeit, small patch of woodland are seedlings and suckers. The worst culprit for the latter are the damsons - they send up new plants all over the place from their roots.

On Sunday last I sat out in the morning - it was in the low 20s C - came in for lunch and went out again - low 10s! Monday and it is 7.5C at lunchtime.

When one writes a blog here there are a labels to select from on the top right - at one point my choice reads - Poem, pond, Prince Charles, rat! Very eclectic.