Stunning day!
Red Straw-Flower
It's yet another stunning autumn day. All is calm, all is bright - and warm and sunny. Perhaps autumn is the best season of the gardening year after all. Or is this the perennial (ahem) garden debate for temperate gardeners?
Friday 23rd April
This morning (after playing some lovely flute and piano music) my friend and I wandered around the garden, with much pointing at this and that. But with human company I see things really differently.
For example, some of the Phormiums in the garden borders look really huge. And the Gunnera is sprawling all over the stream, taking up (probably) far too much room. We could hardly see the water in places, and, after all, a water feature should feature water! Maybe it's time for a sharp spade to chop some fleshy bits back, before the water gets too cold to stand in. Ouch!
Garden Bench by Darmera - Autumn
We sat on the garden bench by the water, next to the Darmera which is turning all shades of gorgeous golds and browns. The beautiful upright red-bronze flaxes across the water, the bushy green ferns on the water's edge, a web stretching right across from bank to bank, complete with central spider - colourful little details that I tend to miss when there's just me talking to a cat or a dog.
Autumn Roses Flowering
And there are so many lovely autumn roses flowering, too, like Crepuscule (for the third time?) and Casino the soft lemon climber. Dahlias are flopping over, but seem desperate to keep on blooming right up to the first frost. There's a lot of shade, too, because the leaves on the big oaks and cherry trees are just starting to turn and fall. Add a clear blue sky and the softest of warm suns, and hey presto! The perfect morning, really.
Cat and Dog and Dahlias
Gardens are meant to be enjoyed. For cats and dogs, however, gardens are places to attend to the more basic calls of nature. Apologies to the sensitive, but I'm afraid that's just what Fluff-Fluff and Rusty are up to in the above photograph.
Autumn Roses :- You might enjoy to peep, too, at some of this year's autumn flowering roses.
Right. It's lunchtime and my head is spinning with tootling Bach themes and counterthemes. I'm slouching around, peeping at the autumn roses and enjoying general views of the garden rather than doing any work in it. But this is OK. There's plenty of time for action this afternoon.
Three Hours Later...
+10
+10Ha! That's three hours raking gum leaves, trimming dead leaves off flaxes and realigning paths in the Wattle Woods. Now the hoses are on watering this extremely dry garden area, which awaits the arrival of more Agapanthus. And if you think that's exactly what I was doing yesterday afternoon, you're right! This time I had cat company - Histeria the tabby and big Fluff-Fluff - who lolled around silently underneath the Anemanthele grasses. They were often in danger of being raked up with the rubbish.
- 'Garden improvements are not continuous - they make visible quantum leaps.'
- -Moosey Words of Wisdom.
Small thought - sensibly taking ones garden duties slowly, one hour at a time, one expects to see a slow, continuous improvement - like a graph with a constant gradient, no discontinuities... But garden improvements make visible quantum leaps! Yippee!
From the Extraordinary to the Mundane...
Now I'm off to the library as a reward, where I will exchange the tremendously quotable Monty Don (and his Extraordinary Gardens of the World) for something a little more mundane - dare I say 'down to earth'? Hee hee. I've had yet another groovy day.
The Climbing Rose Uetersen
Congratulations to the Moosey pink rose Uetersen which just might be featuring in the Sydney Botanical Gardens latest promotion - a rose dedication. It's a great idea, and I hope that the Moosey image isn't too out of focus, etc. for the printers over there. I always blame the wind rather than the wobbly old hand (mine) of the photographer (me).
Wet Patio Pots
Lazybones Rose...
But perhaps a gentle reminder to Uetersen - the label says you're a climber. So how about getting your climbing canes working for me, you lazybones rose...
Saturday 24th April
Did I say we need rain? The ground needs to be generally wetter so the fire ban will come off and I can burn my piles of gum tree rubbish (approximately forty wheelbarrowfuls and steadily increasing in number by various fence-lines). Right. I'm off swimming and when I get home I want it to be raining strongly.
Later...
Blast. It's only 'heavy drizzle, but it's continuous', according to Non-Gardening Partner from the couch, but it's too wet to garden happily. So I'd like to pay a small non-gardening tribute to my chrysanthemums and my shrubby salvias, which I can see from the house.