I gave up on the decorating the other day to go out into the garden as it was such a lovely day. I thought I would read out there but I took a look at my half-finished garden path and ended up humphing paving stones and bags of river pebbles around. There was quite a brisk breeze which was unusually warm but I was really surprised when my neighbour told me that he had just got home from Edinburgh where it was 24 C and on reaching Kirkcaldy he checked his car thermometer and discovered that it was 25 C / 77F. That made it the hottest day of the year! It’s not what we expect at the end of September.
It hasn’t been a great time for the garden due to the weather. My sedums usually have loads of butterflies visiting them, in fact that’s really why I grow them but everything has been so late in flowering due to the cold weather and unlike England we didn’t even have any good weather in the spring. Fife has had the wettest weather in the whole of Britain this year, I thought it had been a wee bit damp! So by the time the sedums opened it was really too late for the butterflies.
There was just this one today which always fluttered past me just when I had a paving slab in my hands. By the time I got the camera it danced off elsewhere, I’m sure it was taunting me! So this is the best I could do photo-wise.
Otherwise there aren’t many flowers on the go at the moment. I had a lot of fuchsias in the garden but they almost all died over the past two appalling winters which we’ve suffered. I bought a new selection for my planter and they have been very late in flowering too, in fact I think that it’ll soon be too cold and dark for them and that will be the end of their growing season. I’ve been taking cuttings of all my new fuchsias as I have a horrible feeling that this coming winter is going to be a doozie too. Things like that always seem to come in threes. I don’t want to lose them all again. They’re supposed to be hardy but then so were my old fuchsias but there’s a limit to what they can be expected to put up with.
