Mellow Days In and Around the Garden

 

This week, we had two of the most perfect days, weather-wise, that anyone could have wished for.  So beautiful were they it would have been a crime not to schedule in some time to enjoy them. 

 Please click the Read more button below if you care to join me for a stroll around the garden .....

 These were the balmy days of Autumn, those "delicious Autumn" days that sent George Eliot into raptures and...

Inspired John Keats to compose his celebrated Ode to Autumn..."Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness; close bosom-friend of the maturing sun."

Hardly a poet has been able to resist her captivating charms...Samuel Butler, William Blake, Robert Burns...the list is endless!

Today, we woke up to a gale force South-easterly wind, not a day to be outdoors from choice.  So, here I am, back at my computer preparing a new post to upload this evening, using the pictures I took in the garden on those two picture-perfect days! 

"Yellow, mellow, ripened days....Beauteous golden Autumn days!" ~ Will Carleton ~

I took my new camera into the garden...

And nervously pointed it at whatever took my fancy!

This was my birthday gift from my husband...in his words, "You have outgrown your old camera, you need something a bit more sophisticated, especially now that you are blogging."

So here I am, sharing the very first pictures I took!

I still have a lot to learn.  Here, I was only using the very basic settings.  My regular readers will recognise this as a section along my garden path!

As with Nathaniel Hawthorne, I too, "cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house.  So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air."

One of the streptocarpus growing in my greenhouse.  They are truly the most rewarding of plants!

When I photographed this African violet, I thought of Diane @ Adventure Before Dementia!  She has finally had success with growing one of her own :)

Fuchias always, always remind me of my Mother!  She grew the most beautiful ones in her gardens in South Africa.  She would simply snap off a twig, stick it in the ground and it would grow into a healthy, floriferous plant!  She is not able to grow them as successfully where she lives in Australia :(

The pots in the greehouse have taken on that lovely aged look!

Self-seeded ferns and mosses have populated the bark in my orchid pots.

And the bromeliad continues to produce glorious flowers!

Impatiens growing in my greenhouse!

Another fern in an orchid pot!

My regular readers will know that maidenhair is my favourite fern...another baby plant popping up in an orchid pot!

A few of my orchids are in bud!  Tiny baby buds, but I have great hopes for them!

Self-sown lobelias :)

The last of my dwarf, summer snapdragons!

Water fern growing in a small water garden outside the greenhouse.

This rose bush produced the most perfect blooms early in the season, but now, these blooms are a lot smaller and somewhat misshapen...but, a rose will always be a rose in my books!

This rose is also a lot smaller than the first blooms of the season, but they last and last on the bush and still smell wonderful! 

 

Seedhead on my clematis.

"Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells."
~ John Keats ~

I hope you've enjoyed this leisurely amble through my Autumn garden.  Hopefully, you'll join me again, soon!