welsh hills again

I wish I wasn't so erratic about gardening.  I really thought I had cracked my tendency to lose interest in the garden in August.  Inspired by Karen  I have begun to engage with September and October in the garden and while my first love will always be spring, I have come to love the golden light of late summer and early autumn.  Maybe it is like a biological clock - you know, the stuff about whether you are a morning or a nighttime person. Perhaps you can have the same thing with times of year.   I have been keeping gardening diaries for ever. Year after year the detailed planning entries and commentaries on what is working and what's not from the early months tail off in mid July into disgruntled little notes "Looks tired", "No colour", "Everything's flopped" or even worse the pages of emptiness where I have clearly got fed up with the garden and gone walking. But the thing about Helen's end of month view posts is that the discipline m...

September rushed past in a blur and here we are at the end of month view again. Here is the side garden.  From this distance it all looks a bit fluffy although from closer to you can tell that the bed at the back of this picture is working quite a bit better than the bed at the side.  The side bed has been planted mainly for spring and summer.  The back bed works well in spring, is a bit empty and sad in summer and comes into its own later in the summer as the crocosmia Lucifer and the sedum bulk up, the rudbeckia shines and the dahlias and cosmos fill out to take the space earlier occupied by the oriental poppies.  It is in this bed that I am intending to put the miscanthus which (having seen and admired Karen's fabulous grassees) I have ordered from Knoll Nurseries. I love this sedum and, wonderfully, it loves our soil and produces enough extra plants every year to allow me to spread it about the garden. I love this dahlia too.  When the new grass goe...