an autumn afternoon in the garden

We've been making the most of the last light evenings to let the hens out for a run.  It is still just about warm enough for the Systems Administrator to sit on the terrace (or patio) standing guard while they fossick about in the Eleagnus hedge.  The pots of Cosmos have a dishevelled, last gasp of summer air about them by now, and the dahlias are telling me that I should have staked them better, but it still looks pretty in the late afternoon light.

I learned something useful about dahlias in yesterday afternoon's talk.  The books say that you should leave them standing until they are blackened by the first frost, and I'd never understood why.  I often do, because there are always so many jobs to do in the garden that cutting down the dahlias ahead of time isn't generally top of the list, but it wasn't a rule I followed with any conviction.  According to Rosy Hardy the onset of cold weather prompts the dahlias to seal off their tubers from the remains of the stems.  Cut them down prematurely and you risk water running down inside the hollow stems and setting off rot in the tubers.  The hollow stemmed Salvia uliginosa, which I grow, should always be left to die down naturally and not chopped down while still in growth in a fit of premature tidiness, for the same reason.

There are still flowers to come in the island bed in the back garden.  The asters are just hitting their full stride, though after the botanists had their latest go at categorising the constituents of the vast daisy family most of them are not asters any more.   The taller asters (which are no longer asters) can go very bare and leggy at the base, and their gaunt, straight stems can look odd shooting up right at the front of the border, so I tend to put them behind other things.

One is a generous patch of Kniphofia caulescens, an exotic evergreen (though sadly battered in a hard winter) red hot poker, with clumps of lax, silvery leaves resembling a relaxed yucca.  Mine was planted during 2002, so has survived a fair few snow falls and plunging night temperatures, even if it looked dreadful at the end of them.  It is only now coming into flower, with pinky orange poker shaped flower clusters developing on fat grey stems.  It has spread a fair way from its original pot full, and must be a full yard across by now.  I was pleased to see the buds, since I'd forgotten quite how late it flowered and was starting to wonder if it was going to this year.

We'd been congratulating each other on how well the chickens were flocking together, only to realise this afternoon that there were only three in the hedge.  I found the fourth alone at the very bottom of the garden, scratching vigorously among the primroses under the Zelkova.  I chivvied her back up the hill to join the flock, while she ran rocking from side to side like the hens in Chicken Run, and shrieking her indignation at being herded, or mounting panic at being separated from the other hens.  She won't last if she goes sneaking off like that.  Charlie, you see, is in the tree line.