I've been a little casual about writing my blog this summer, that happens, stuff happens, and I think to blog it, but then more stuff happens, and then before I know it I'm on a catch up and I don't know where to start. 
So, to make things easy, I'm going to start with today, and forget what has happened over the past few weeks. It may be that once I'm back in the swing of scribbling and recording my doings I will pick up some of the summer threads but for the mean time, I will focus on today. 
Every six months or so I turn my compost heaps, sieving the end heap so that the beautiful, sweet-smelling, friable earth is separate from any un-rotted twigs and clinker. I cannot put into words how much pleasure this job gives me. 
Often I am joined by a robin but this years visitor was much shyer than in previous years, or less hungry, and watched and whistled at me from a distance. 
I use the fresh compost to top dress alternating flower beds in the garden which allows me to get to know what is growing and to really feel the earth as I move and muddle plants that are in the wrong place, or new to me. 
A few weeks ago my dad gave me a viburnum layer which he had potted up for me, so that has now found it's place. And I've been moving clumps of iris foetidissima about. I started with just a few of these some years back that they have self seeded liberally, which is good although the leaves really do smell bad. 
It's autumn and although we've just had a week of that beautiful golden sunshine that comes with the season. It's the kind of balmy weather that makes a body feel like summer is still hanging in there tho' the light is different, more slanting and in many ways more gorgeous than summer's more fearsome glare. But there's not so many flowers, and not so many insects either. 
The hydrangeas are now a dusky pink, fading as they go over. The fuschias and persicaras are still in bloom, and the cyclamen have started to come out. 
And various seedheads - columbine, honesty and red campion - are ripe. In a better managed garden I would leave my grasses and seedheads to weather the winter, some gardeners manage to make that look very nice but unfortunately my garden is too much of a shambles to have good looking untidiness, so most of them get cut back after they have shed their seed. Gardens are an ongoing process anyway, one day, maybe, my garden will look just so all the year round and in the meantime I'll just live in hope.