From The Wild Garden of the Waning Year

Hedgerow Bouquets

 

I had written the word Cornucopia in my notebook but couldn't remember why.  Then it struck me that this time of year the hedgerows are a veritable Cornucopia of wonderful things to gather.  Berries and fruits shine out like beacons waiting to be plucked from their often thorny stems.  Scarlet hips, crimson haws, indigo sloes  with a pale bloom on their skins.  Glistening purple elderberries drooping under the weight of the fruit.  Burnt orange rowan berries hanging in clusters.  Acid green crab apples like perfect miniatures.  Knobbly horse chestnuts.  Spiky sweet chestnuts.  Food for free that Mother Nature provides from her wild garden.

It has been a pretty chaotic week and I have had very little time for visiting blogs or even thinking about my own post - so I will just let the pictures do the talking.

 

 

The last berries, apples and plums, wet and almost rotting from the late sun and autumn rain, lend a mellow, alcoholic scent to the space, like the dregs of an abandoned glass of wine.  The garden is falling asleep with an air of damp tobacco and wood smoke, but it is still abundant too, with late blackberries, damsons and a grapevine at breaking point.  Each year I race to get to those blackberries before the feast of Michaelmas, when the devil is said to piss on them. ~ Nigel Slater

Autumn cooking is for storing, squirrelling and hoarding, in larder and cupboard, attic and cellar and freezer.  In the mornings, a mist rises and wreathes in and out between the tree trunks.  On the damp grass lie windfall apples and pears, burrowed into by late wasps.  By noon, the sun is high, and it is warm.  The leaves are beginning to yellow and curl.  Runner bean flowers are shrivelling at the tops of their poles.  Fruits hang thickly clustered from their stems, over-ripe, ready to fall, plums and damsons, apples and pears, rowan and elderberries and dark succulent brambles. ~ Susan Hill

 

Garden Bounty - early September 2015

My home is turned upside-down at the moment with inches of dust everywhere. The electrician has been to put in new wall sockets.  The radiators have been taken off the walls and drained leaving black sludge on the carpet. Oh my.    The plasterer comes next week to do the walls so we are going away for a few days to leave him to it.  It will be bliss to stay somewhere that is normal and clean and organised with everything in its place - and hopefully I can leave all the stress of it behind too.  Just for a few days anyway.

I wish you Adieu - 'til next time.

Elaine