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Friends Rob and Helen visited for lunch today. They arrived late in the morning and remained until early evening. We spent a very enjoyable afternoon catching up with each other.
For lunch Jackie had made a superb leek and potato soup followed by plentiful cold meats and salads. Rob and I shared a bottle of Languedoc red wine of 2016 vintage.
Helen and I began early on a photographic tour of the garden.
She used a very impressive Fuji bridge camera,
and actually focussed on some of my own favourite subjects, such as begonias
and the rose For Your Eyes Only.
Alongside the latter, Lady Emma Hamilton is rejuvenated,
continuing to bloom in The Rose Garden where red antirrhinums still thrive.
Autumn leaves are beginning to fall. Some, suspended in spiders’ webs, wait to reach this glass table on the decking.
Among the clematises enjoying another flowering are these in the Back Drive Barrier boxes, leading the eye from the purple petunias to the now reddening leaves of Virginia creeper on the back fence;
and this one sharing Margery’s Bed with Japanese anemones.
Petunias continue to cascade from the iron urn,
and from the hanging basket over the Shady Path. Begonias are planted in the bed below and New Guinea impatiens shares the basket.
Here is today’s example of a fuchsia. Helen created many good images of these and others.
We walked up and down paths like the one termed Gazebo
sharing the corner of Margery’s Bed with the Phantom Path.
Just before lunch Jackie and Rob joined us.
Rob was intrigued by the regeneration of the apparently dead yellow leaved tree that has live stems on either side of the wasted trunk.
Given that rain set in early this afternoon, we had chosen the best part of the day to concentrate on the garden.
Jackie and I just grazed on small plates of salad this evening.
