On a balmy late-summer morning I took my camera around the garden seeking auguries of the true autumn as opposed to the false one we experienced as a consequence of the heatwave of a month ago.
We have two crab apple trees in the front garden, the fruit of which have, until last winter, nourished our blackbirds throughout the colder months. During the last such season they eschewed these offerings. It remains to be seen whether these members of the Malus genus will this year fall untasted to the ground.
This blue lace cap hydrangea is borne by a regenerated stem on a plant apparently finished for the year.
Varieties of wilting phlox have also rejuvenated,
as have drought-dried dahlias, while
blooming begonias burgeon once more.
Dwarf sunflowers grown from seed have emerged from the soil.
Pale lilac colchicums, or autumn crocuses, nod to their season,
as do Rosa Glauca hips
and the barren seed heads of some clematises.
Virginia creeper’s mantle draping the south wall of the back drive is turning to its warm autumnal hues.
Crown Princess Margareta continues climbing over the rose garden covered bench,
and Special Anniversary has come round again.
White solanum and purple clematis clamber over the dead elm trunk.
This evening Jackie drove us all over to Spice Cottage in Westbourne where we dined with Becky and Ian. Flo, Dillon, and Ellie remained to stay with our daughter and son-in-law for a couple of nights.
I will feature this event with a couple of photographs tomorrow.
Our Waterboy feature had been reduced to a mere trickle by the narrow pipe feeding the fountain from the pump being clogged up. Jackie spent much of
the morning clearing the blockages and restoring normal working order.
I dozed over an Iris Murdoch for most of this very hot day until 5 p.m. when I
adjudged it cool enough for a walk around the garden with my camera. These images all bear titles in the gallery.
Jackie had slept upstairs for a couple of hours, and, refreshed, suggested a drive to Puttles Bridge to investigate the condition of Ober Water, which,
although far shallower than usual contained just enough liquid for
a dog chasing a stick to create a splash.
Unfortunately the first thing I saw as I disembarked in the car park had been
a heap of discarded rubbish. There is of course a bin nearby.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s spicy paprika pork served with boiled potatoes and tender runner beans, with which she drank Hoegaarden and I drank more of the Shiraz.
Yesterday’s winds were not quite as bad as expected, but they persisted today, amid sunny spells. The Head Gardener carried out more pruning, clipping, and tidying, with minimal assistance from me.
After lunch I wandered around with my camera.
Here is a selection of our white flowers, comprising Marguerites, cosmos, dahlias. Japanese anemones, and petunias.
Begonias come in varying colours, shapes and sizes.
as, of course, do the dahlias.
The pale peach and the yellow Summer Time climbers flower throughout the season.
Hues of hydrangeas and lilies, including hemerocallis are also numerous.
Crocosmia, including Lucifer, towering in the Palm Bed, and the more orange one against the red Japanese maple in the Pond Bed send up flickering flames signifying different heats.
Despite the winds of this unusual August, we still enjoy the exuberance of Nature’s painter’s palette.
I then scanned the next four of Charles Keeping’s skilfully sensitive illustrations to Dickens’s ‘David Copperfield’
‘I lay my face upon the pillow by her, and she looks into my eyes, and speaks very softly’
‘Standing by the building was a plain hearse’
‘The ship rolled and beat with a violence quite inconceivable’
‘ ‘I will speak!’ she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes’
The delicious meal consisted of roast chicken thighs; crisp Yorkshire pudding and fried potatoes; herby sage and onion stuffing; crunchy carrots and cauliflower; with thick, meaty, gravy. We each drank more of our rosé and red wines respectively.
This morning Jackie continued with her general maintenance work, including
autumn cleaning the greenhouse, and clearing and resetting paths such as the Head Gardener’s Walk.
My minimal intervention was the removal of brambles invading from No. 5 Downton Lane. This, and the amount of weeds piercing the gravel is somewhat reminiscent of our arrival here 1n 2014.
I then wandered around with my camera.
Each of these images bears a title in the gallery,
as do these in the front garden one. Please ignore the rose stems that need sorting out.
This afternoon we drove into the forest.
If these ponies had come for a drink beside Bisterne Close they would have been disappointed because the pool has virtually dried up.
I stopped along Burley Road to investigate the tree work on the fallen giant that has recently added its bulk to the
arboreal ossuary that this area has become.
Early this evening, having been encouraged by my very good blogging friend, Uma Shankar, One Grain Amongst the Storm, and endorsed by another, Laurie Graves, to break up the sequence of material on my three great aunts, I made headway in preparing the next episodes of A Knight’s Tale.
Later, we dined on a repeat of yesterday’s menu, with which Jackie drank the same white wine and I quaffed Colin-Bourisset Fleurie 2019.
In an earlier post Tangental asked for suggestions for flowers that would be blooming in the last week of August when he hopes to host a family event. Although, he, the Textiliste, and Dog themselves have an enviable garden I promised to let him know what we have currently flowering. Needless to say they will be aware of most of what I have to offer, but, here goes.
This month does not finish until next Monday, the 31st, but this will be the last full week. We are predicted to be hit by another fierce storm tomorrow so I decided to post what we still have today.
The second of these two pictures demonstrates that gladioli are vulnerable to gusts of wind and need to be supported with stakes strong enough to see off Count Dracula.
Carpet roses come in a variety of colours and drape everything in sight. The red one might be appropriate for the special occasion.
Super Elfin is a fast growing prolific climber.
Given the occasion, the red Love Knot, might be appropriate; this one, and the sweetly scented peachy Mamma Mia and yellow Absolutely Fabulous survived our heavy pruning yesterday. The latter two are most prolific repeat flowering.
This is all that is left of For Your Eyes Only, the most prolific rose of all, but so resilient is it that all our snips will have prepared the way for plentiful new shoots within the next sennite (Archaic English WP).
At this time of year Rosa Glauca converts clusters of delicate pink and white flowers to rosy hips.
A variety of hydrangeas still thrive,
and hibiscus,
seen also with red and white dahlias and tall, strongly scented, bronze fennel, has come into its own.
This is of course the time for dahlias, of which we have a range.
Our Japanese anemones come in two shades of pink and in white. In the third of these images they blend well with pink pelargoniums and fuchsia Delta’s Sarah.
Pelargoniums and geraniums will grace any hanging basket,
as will begonias of any shape, size, or hue;
likewise sometimes scented petunias.
Provided you keep up with dead-heading, as with most of these plants, sweet scented phlox of many different colours will continue to delight.
We find rudbeckia hard to grow a second year, but this Goldsturm variety returns.
A number of crocosmia, like Emily MacKenzie and the yellow one we can’t identify for certain, are still blooming, although others such as Lucifer have finished, but, like Arnie, will be back.
The daisy-like erigeron and yellow bidens offer points of highlight throughout the garden. Erigeron thrives in paving, steps, and stony soil; all our bidens are self seeded survivors from last year.
Sedums begin to blush towards the end of the summer. The second picture has a backdrop of ornamental grass, some of which puts us in mind of Cousin It from the Adams Family. All good space fillers.
Eucomis, or pineapple plants, are a fun talking point;
nasturtiums trail everywhere until the first frost.
Nigella is a little blue flower.
This white solanum has flowered consistently for more than twelve months, far outstripping its neighbouring honeysuckle, now transformed into not very attractive berries. The solanum comes in blue, too.
Jackie produced a dinner this evening consisting of her special savoury rice served with prawns, some of which were spicy, and others tempura, with which she drank Hoegaarden and I drank more of the Saint-Chinian.
Early this sultry morning, before setting off to meet her sisters for lunch, Jackie carried out necessary garden irrigation which I continued after enjoying the lunch she had left prepared for me. After giving pots a fresh-water- and myself a sudorific-drenching I proceeded to a little dead heading that I had failed to ignore.
Aaron, working at Mistletoe Cottage, dropped in for a chat.
Later, my clammy shirt now cold, like James Joyce’s wet bed sheet (“When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.” – ‘A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man” ),
I wandered around with my camera.
The random photographic results are all labelled in the gallery that can be accessed by clicking on any image each of which may be enlarged in the usual manner.
This evening we completed the watering and I cut off a few more heads before dining on spicy pepperoni pizza and plentiful fresh salad with which Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I drank more of the Carles.
During a heavily overcast yet warm morning I took a walk around the garden with my camera.
At the front of the house I photographed just one example of our fuchsia Delta’s Sarah and pink pelargoniums; a severally-hued hydrangea alongside white marguerites with yellow buttery centres; and the first of three rich red lily plants to bloom.
Another Delta’s Sarah is found among pink sweet peas and verbena bonariensis in the Weeping Birch Bed
which can be approached via stepping stones across the Cryptomeria Bed which is named from
the tree seen behind the standing lamp to the right of top centre in this picture of the Gazebo Path.
The white rose, Winchester Cathedral, and the peachy Lady Emma Hamilton are enjoying further flushes in the Rose Garden.
The blue and white petunias in the Ali Baba planter are beginning their descent which will have them cascading like those in this container accompanied by sweet peas, hot lips, and lobelias.
Just before mid-day we drove through a busy Highcliffe intending to brunch at The Beach House café on Friars Cliff. Both the car park and the beach were so crowded that we turned back and lunched at home.
I spent the afternoon finishing reading ‘Love in the time of Cholera’ by Colombian Nobel prizewinner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is the entry from brittania.com written by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria:
Gabriel García Márquez, (born March 6, 1927, Aracataca, Colombia—died April 17, 2014, Mexico City, Mexico), Colombian novelist and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, mostly for his masterpiece Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude). He was the fourth Latin American to be so honoured, having been preceded by Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral in 1945 and Pablo Neruda in 1971 and by Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1967. With Jorge Luis Borges, García Márquez is the best-known Latin American writer in history. In addition to his masterly approach to the novel, he was a superb crafter of short stories and an accomplished journalist. In both his shorter and longer fictions, García Márquez achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader while satisfying the most demanding of sophisticated critics.
It must be 30 years since I first read this marvellous novel, and now, I hope, have done so with far greater understanding.
I do not know Spanish, but I am quite certain that Edith Grossman’s translation has contributed greatly to the fluidity of Jonathan Cape’s 1988 edition. The author is clearly a master of the long, eloquent, sentence and it must have taken great skill to convey this.
The book is filled with wisdom, insight, and humour, penned in flowing, natural language. Its theme is a lifetime of loves described in emotional and physical detail with all the accompanying passion, anxiety, intrigue, anguish, guilt, jealousies – you name the feelings – they are there.
What, wondered this reader in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, has cholera to do with the story, which is well told? After all the disease barely merits a mention until the penny drops; I will refrain from telling you when.
This evening we dined on oven fish and chips, peas, gherkins, and pickled onions, with which Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I finished the Fleurie.
This morning I printed a copy of my recent photograph of Aaron for his parents. His A.P. Maintenance tasks included the repair of
the door of the Orange Shed which had managed to beat the shed itself to collapsing;
and to level the uneven, sagging, brick footpath which had kept tripping me up in the
Rose Garden, from the south west corner of which can be viewed
this hydrangea and fuchsia Magellanica.
Chequerboard is another fuchsia hanging beside clematis Niobe which scales the Gothic Arch;
clematis Madame Julia Correvon forms a serpentine diagonal with her neighbour sidalcea;
another clematis tops the arch spanning the Phantom Path in this view from the Cryptomeria Bed to the greenhouse;
today’s final scene contains two more clematis climbing the kitchen wall, among petunias, pelargoniums, fuchsia Delta’s Sara, Erigeron and more.
After lunch I spent some time clearing up clippings from Jackie’s morning maintenance and carrying trug-loads to the compost bins. Reading occupied the rest of my afternoon.
This evening we dined on succulent roast lamb; crisp roast potatoes including ipomoea batatas; crunchy carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli; with meaty gravy. Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I drank more of the Rioja.
Today, still cool, featured intermittent sunshine while cotton clouds pierced by cerulean patches sailed sedately overhead.
We carried out the usual garden maintenance including watering, planting, pruning, and dead-heading.
Jackie smiled when she first spied that I had come out to join her, but she didn’t see the camera hanging round my neck. I have taken to wearing it in order not to miss such photographic opportunities.
Here we have the peach rose, a couple of hemerocallis, sweet peas, white dahlias, sidalcea, yucca, and fuchsia Shrimp Cocktail. As usual each individual image is labelled in the gallery which can be viewed full size by clicking the box underneath it. Further enlargement is possible by additional clicks.
Mauve gladioli stand beneath the clematis covering the Agriframes Arch.
Shropshire Lad and linaria purpurea checked themselves out in the mirror placed to extend the Rose Garden views.
Here Jackie carried out pruning, the results of which I would clear up later.
The marguerites alongside the hydrangea in the corner of the front garden will unfortunately need to be cut down soon because they obscure the view of the Chauffeuse when driving out.
Bees enjoyed flitting from one verbena bonariensis to another.
We now have more robins than we can identify. This is not Nugget.
It was a good gardening day.
For a while now, it has not been pleasant enough for us to enjoy our evening drinks in the Rose Garden. This changed today.
From my seat in the north east corner I could see the hemerocallis in the Cryptomeria Bed and the lilies above Mamma Mia catching the evening sun.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s tasty lamb curry; savoury rice; salt and pepper prawns; and vegetable samosas. I also enjoyed the chilli bhaji. The Culinary Queen drank Hoegaarden and I drank Corte Aurelia Squinzano Riserva 2015.
The bare copper beach brings clear signs of autumn to the garden, as
Jackie continues her clearance of the Palm Bed and, in particular,
the Dead End Bed. This New Zealand hebe has received heavy pruning.
The thick limb to the right of the chimney planter, and supporting the remaining branches, has been rooted from the original shrub that had been planted further back some years ago.
Here is another view from Margery’s Bed.
Jackie has removed some plants, repositioned others like the potted hydrangea ready for planting, set a profusion of spring bulbs,
and stepping stones for access during next spring’s burgeoning.
Clearance and replanting has also been carried out on the opposite side of the path.
The same treatment has been applied to other bed’s such as Margery’s which can hopefully expect a profusion of richly hued Black Beauty Dutch irises.
Here, the Head Gardener contemplates the remains of a crocosmia collection. She did most of her own compost accumulation, but left me a little.
Anticipated winds in excess of 50 m.p.h. prompted the usual emergency grounding of the wooden patio chairs.
This evening, with additional starters of tempura prawns and vegetable wantons, we dined on our second helpings of Hordle Chinese Take Away, with which Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I drank Patrick Chodot Fleurie 2018.
