Definitely autumnal...

...and yet there is still beauty to be seen in the garden borders.  Some folk find autumn to be a rather sad season, where the voluptuous bounty of summer rapidly fades away, but really it's just the garden taking off it's clothes and pulling on it's pyjamas ready for the long refreshing sleep of winter.  And before we know it spring will be here once more, and we can renew our friendships with all of our beloved plants 😊

I love the glossy red hips of rosa rugosa ~ as do the blackbirds if the half-eaten remains left on the lawn are anything to go by!  These are actually growing in our neighbour's garden but we get to share the beauty of their blooms.  The hips always remind me of my Mum telling me how much Dad liked the rosehip syrup I had as a baby 😄  I wonder when ~ and why ~ giving rosehip syrup to babies stopped being a thing?  I know it certainly wasn't something I gave to the gruesome-twosome almost 30 years ago (omg, how can my kids be nearly 30 years old 😲), so things must have changed sometime between the early 60s and early 90s.

I was having a poke around in the ornamental garden that is currently masquerading as a wilderness when I spotted that this poppy had decided to have a second flourish of leaves ~ and pop out a flower bud, too!  I have read that if they are cut back after flowering is finished then some poppies will have a second flush in August but I think this one has left it a bit late this year!

Apologies if you are arachnaphobic ~ I'm not that keen on the eight-legged little beasties myself, to be honest.  This one, though, wasn't really scary despite it's looooong legs and apparently isn't even a spider!  It's a harvestman according to the RSPB, and they are Opilones, which is a group of arachnids closely related to spiders 😉

Moving swiftly on from that little natural history lesson...

...take a look at something that's much prettier than a spider-that's-only-pretending-to-be-a-spider, a sweet little potentilla Pink Whisper.  The bees really like potentillas, I guess it's easy for them to get to the pollen with those flat open flowers.

This is potentilla nepalensis Miss Willmott.  It's a very different-looking plant to Pink Whisper despite them both being in the potentilla family.

Autumn is, of course, the season for asters.  This is aster novi belgii Jenny.

The verbena bonarensis is still going strong.  We've had some high winds but it seems to cope admirably.  I love the way it is rising up behind the montbretia, and the contrast of the blue against the orange 😊

Despite being moved all the lupins bloomed, and some have even put out a second flush of flower spikes.

More of those beautiful rosa rugosa hips, this time in the bed beside the pond.

It seems that the sedums Autumn Joy turn a deeper red every day.

Fungi-opolis!

We've had masses of these cute little fungi this year.

I don't know anything about fungi, I'm afraid (other than the ones in the supermarket are very tasty 😋), but have been told that these are probably from the Coprinellus family.  They like to grow on or near rotting tree stumps.

And finally, I couldn't resist taking a photograph of the view from our house.....we are very lucky to live here 😍