For the past several years, Dave at The Home Garden has hosted The Fall Color Project, giving bloggers an opportunity to share links to their posts on peak fall colors in their area. This year, I didn’t even have to leave Hayefield to find lots of showy autumn leaves.
Having several hundred photos to sort through made preparing this month’s Bloom Day post a daunting project, but also a fun one. After a few episodes of my computer freezing each time I added yet another image, I finally accepted that the post was getting even more excruciatingly long than usual. So, I’ve decided to split it into three parts: a proper Bloom Day post focusing on flowers and garden shots; another in a week or so for fruits, seeds, and grasses; and a third on leaves alone as my contribution to The Fall Color Project 2011.
Sometimes it takes a new pair of eyes (or nearly 200 new pairs of eyes) to make you appreciate a plant that you walk past every day with hardly a second glance. Of all the bright flowers and in-your-face foliage plants I have here, one of the stars of this past weekend’s garden tour was a rather subtle, plain green annual with the common name of widow’s tears.
No whinging about it being hot and dry here at Hayefield this month. Since August’s Bloom Day, we’ve received 16.95 inches of rain, which is *way* more than enough, thank you very much. The lack of sunshine has held back the fall extravaganza a bit, but it’s still pretty colorful around here. At this time of year, overview shots of the garden look better than closeups.
Unless you’re lucky enough to garden in a place well sheltered from passersby, you’ve probably had to deal with your share of “clever” comments from non-gardeners. One I get quite often is “Hey, when you’re done there, you can come and fix up my yard.” My rote response to that is “Sure, when I’m finished here, I’ll be right over.” Which is to say, of course, “Don’t hold your breath,” because we gardeners know that a garden is never really finished, at least from a maintenance perspective.
