I chose this rose, the William Shakespeare - which is one of David Austen's English roses, for his colour rather than his name, and he does smell sweet; as a bonus, he has the ability to withstand the constant rain of this summer. 'The rain it raineth every day,' as Will S himself observed.Maybe it's because this is a rose absolutely packed with petals, and they hold each other up, whereas other roses fall apart. I only planted him last year, and he's only just getting going with the flowering, but giving me great joy as an autumnal treat.
Another treat is the salvia patens, 'Cambridge Blue.' I'd find a better name. 'Mediterranean sea,' for example. It's so hard to find really blue flowers, most of the so-called blues are actually purple. I don't want to look down on them - another delight of the garden is the blue clary sage, which has flowered solidly from May till now from an autumn sowing last year. Salvias do well in my chalky, well-drained chalky soil. Being well-drained is an asset this year, of course.
My grandson came to stay last week, and I made a scarecrow for his amusement, inspired by dog-headed scarecrows at Knightshayes garden in Devon, which we visited on holiday - which has also inspired me to order elephant garlic to grow next year, garlic being another thing that loves my chalky garden. They looked so cool, being so enormous. Max named the scarecrow Apple, which is probably appropriate for our garden at present. We've more or less finished the flood of Tydeman's Early Worcester, a wonderful red apple with a perfumed taste, which doesn't keep at all. There's a lot of stewed apple in the freezer, and I've given a lot of apples away. Now we're onto the keepers; the mystery apple that I ordered as a russet but which is a cox relative, an equable, well-performing chap, absolutely delicious. Then we're onto Sunset (another cox relative), which is growing deeper and deeper red now, but still isn't ready to pick, and last of all, the dwarf Cornish Gillyflower, which only produces a few apples, but they have the most wonderful complex spicy flavour.
It's official that it was one of the coolest summers for years, and some things have performed poorly - predictably, all the mediterranean vegetables, though courgettes have done OK. I have less winter squashes, but the yield isn't bad. But leafy veg have been wonderful, in spite of slugzillas, and the French beans and borlottis haven't done at all badly. Till now, we have been self-sufficient in vegetables for about six weeks. The raspberries have had their best year ever; about 500 grammes a day and yummy. They seem to adore wet weather.
Anyway, here is Apple the scarecrow. Matilda the real dog doesn't approve of him at all and keeps barking at him. I think he's rather appealing.
If it had been left to me, though, I'd probably have called him Peter Quince after the character in the Midsummer Night's Dream, but also after our quince tree which is literally weighed down with fruit, even more so than the sunset apple, and the path between the quince tree and the fruit cage is completely blocked as a result, The fruit is just lying on the grass. Quince jelly beckons, quince cheese, and also I shall go on the internet to see if I can find a recipe for pate de coings, French-style! I shall take a bagfull of them to Quaker Meeting on Sunday with a pile of printed recipe sheets, I think..
The cyclamens, which my daughter Jo said were like scared cats, sticking ears and tail in the air, are blooming all over the garden, and I do love them, but also now we have autumn crocuses. The German name for these is 'Herbstzeitlosen,' which is beautiful, and hard to translate, but means 'autumn timelessnesses.' I saw them first, not in gardens, but growing on roadsides in Upper Bavaria when I was sixteen, like something from a fairy-tale, I thought - and they still seem to me to live in a realm of dreams. They're the colour of dreams, too, I feel.
