Hunter’s Moon

I have been enjoying the Autumn evenings over half term. There is still enough light to do half an hour in the garden after the littlest ones are down to bed and I’m often getting a stack of washing in anyway. It has been so still and peaceful, glorious sunsets adorning the sky. The plants are dying back, elegant skeletal remnants of their former glory. I have left the grass long this year, to help it recover from the trauma of the dry summer. Oh, it did look forlorn. I pounce on each fallen leaf from the fig tree. As big as dinner plates, they are perfect as a mulch on my patio pots, keeping the weeds at bay. I have slowly been putting the garden to bed. This year I have laid a lot of my cuttings over any bare soil. I have learnt from my allotment reading that this is good for worms, and hence good for the soil.

I have had to cut the rambling roses back hard. Apparently they should normally be pruned in August but a renovation-prune should not be done until now. I have a lot to learn about roses. I learnt this year that I should have trained them along the horizontal and then the new-flowering-growth would work up the vertical, but I had it all backwards, hence the hard prune. I hope they don’t die! The hanging baskets are down and stored on a nail in the shed. As I work the shadows grow longer and the air more chilly, until at last the whole garden is dim and the kitchen lights send bright rectangles across the side-return. The Hunter’s Moon is high in the sky. I briefly stop on the doorstep to take a deep breathe of star-lit evening air then head inside to the snug warmth.