At the front of the house, the stag head sumac is putting on a spectacular show of autumn colour.

And beneath the sumac tree, by our front door there’s a few blooms from what I think are ‘Rosa Ballerina’ and ‘Hypericum Hidcote.’ Anything that manages to put out some colourful flowers in mid-October is most welcome in this garden!

At the side of the house, the Japanese anemone and sweetpeas are still flowering away. I guess they might keep going until the first frost. I’m still picking a few sweetpeas for the house each week, although they’re slowing down, they’re still a beautiful feature…

Doesn’t a clipped hedge really neatens up a space! Yesterday contractors arrived and clipped the enormous laurel hedge that borders our back garden.

Behind this hedge is what once was a grand garden, which now contains sycamore saplings, brambles, nettles, wildflowers, and sometimes foxes, and those huge trees. It belongs to the care home next door, and it’s been sort of accidentally rewilding for several years. About twice a year, contractors arrive to strim and trim the most overgrown bits and then it all grows back… I was annoyed when they strimmed it in summer and the number of bats we saw dropped as their feeding ground had been cut back, but the bats will have headed a few hundred yards down the hill to the hedgerows on the community owned fields nearby, so it’s not all bad news.

I’ve moved this witch hazel closer to the house, hoping to get more of it’s bewitching sweet scent when these buds open and the little sweet smelling flowers emerge.

And readers will be thrilled to learn that we finally got around to varnishing the wooden greenhouse.

We’d only been putting it off for about three or four months. We learned why leaving this job until October isn’t ideal, as during the cold damp night, water oozed out from the varnish we’d applied that afternoon, and it took much longer to dry than it should have. However, lesson learned and job done.

We are well past the autumn equinox now, and the nights are definitely drawing in. This has some advantages, as we can sit out at sunset, with a little fire and a G&T before dinner. It’s funny how the ‘enclosure’ of an open sided, roofless space like this makes you feel cosy, even though it’s not actually enclosed…

Well, that may be seven pictures but nonetheless that’s my ‘Six on Saturday’ which I’ll share with the Propagator and the merry throng of garden bloggers who share their garden highlights.

I hope that you’ve managed to get round to anything you’ve been putting off and that you have a wonderful season of autumn colour.

Jen x