golden hop

If you look closely at the photo above you should be able to see some apples on the tree. Actually there are quite a lot there and some of the branches were bent under the weight, but I picked them off last week, just before they would have fallen off and some have been eaten in a crumble, the others were blanched and are in the freezer.

Japanese anemones – they grow like crazy and some people see them as a menace, but I love them, especially as they last such a long time and there aren’t too many pink flowers around in the autumn.

This is actually a different variety of Japanese anemone, they’re a bit frillier, there are also some montbretia (the orange flowers) in the photo, now they ARE a menace. This area is sort of organised chaos in the cottage garden style, that’s my excuse anyway!

I love daisy shaped flowers but Michaelmas daisies aren’t my favourites which is weird because I love the lilac colour but they always seem quite weedy to me.

I love my liquidamber tree but I’m getting a wee bit worried about it as in past years it has had a mass of leaves and this year it’s definitely looking a lot sparser. Maybe it prefers miserable wet and cold weather and this year’s unusual warmth hasn’t suited it – it suited me though.

The one above is my golden hop. If you’re a beer drinker this is one of the main ingredients of your brew. The flowers aren’t all that startling but I like them and it’s an easy plant to grow.

Some white autumn crocus this time or naked ladies as they are sometimes called as they pop up with no leaves at all and the leaves don’t appear until the spring, just on their own.

I love this time of the year. We went on a woodland walk today and I left the house armed with a plastic container just in case we found some juicy looking brambles which I would just have to pick. The mission was a success, but more about that at a later date.

I allow these alpine strawberries to grow in amongst the other plants in my garden, rather than having them in rows together. It’s more natural looking that way and the birds seem to leave them alone. Sometimes I stumble across a strawberry plant which I didn’t even know was there whilst I’m weeding. They’ve sort of gone a bit wild, they may be really wee but to me they taste really delicious, especially compared with the big fat strawberries which you get in most supermarkets. They look sumptuous but they’re often such a disappointment as they’re pretty tasteless.

As you can see, I try to squeeze as much into my garden as possible, I’m also not very good at cutting things back. I get into a terrible mess sometimes, well the plants do because I say to myself – I’ll prune it after it flowers, and then when it flowers I’m saying I’ll just let the birds have the berries.

There are several shrubs shoehorned in, the bright yellow climbing one is a golden hop. The original plant doesn’t seem to have survived the winter but several bits of it have ‘hopped’ elsewhere, and they are doing fine.

The perenial sweet peas have been in the garden since we moved here over 23 years ago and they are a bit of a menace because they pop up all over the place like goose-grass and unfortunately this is the only colour that they come up in. The yellow flowering plant was a teeny wee bit of root which was given to me and I don’t know what it is but it’s very vigorous too and I’ve been trying to get rid of most of it because I think it’s strangling some plants.

I got my love of gardening from my dad and I think he probably wouldn’t have given my foxgloves space in his garden. He would almost certainly have regarded them as weeds but I love them and more importantly the bees adore them, so I just leave them to seed themselves, which they’re very happy to do.

Well that’s the latest meander around my garden over. I hope you enjoyed the wee stroll!

Pining for the West

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