benign neglect

o poor neglected garden. but actually it doesn't seem to be minding too much. the grass is a bit long i suppose and the ground elder is rampaging into the right-hand bed but apart from that............amazingly enough one of the freesias has come up! and once again we have an ectopic lobelia, this time in the bed not the drain............same lobelia, different place......the Persicaria has suddenly got absolutely huge after doing nothing much for months, this time maybe i won't cut it down and just see what it does. Diascia *still* flowering away and definitely wins this year's award for Hardest-Working Plant. begonias etc still in flower so i don't feel a great urge to cut things down and clear things away...........however last year they went on right into the winter so it never got done in the end. well, not until spring................also among the nice surprises is a Michaelmas daisy proudly flowering away in the lavender patch - where the hell did that come from? one of the stocks has come up at last after a very, very long wait.............and the lavender has taken nicely but is in danger of being swamped by grass and weeds. Caryopteris in flower and pretty.............borage everywhere.............i've pulled up my onions with great pride and laid them to dry, and have still to harvest the courgette...........yes, just one, but it was a bit of an experiment, next year cloches to keep the slugs off.............the wild strawberry has rooted and grown, so have both comfreys, so lots of comfrey feed next year............i haven't planted Janice's paeonies, not quite sure where to put them but that right-hand bed remains a problem with big gaps so maybe they could go there..........the purple clematis is flowering a second time, the australian mint bush did the same, it's been a funny year for weather, all that rain.............
i did mean to put in more bulbs but as usual i can't remember where it was i thought they needed to go. anyway, next year will be different again. i did so much work earlier in the year that there isn't actually a whole lot to do now, given that i can accept a degree of wildness and disorder. the pond is still a concern...............i really don't want to have to take it all apart and re-line it if there really is a leak, but i may have to once all the vegetation recedes...................only if it's like last year it never got that cold and the vegetation didn't recede, so it would mean ripping everything up which i don't want to do now things are established. maybe it's just all the duckweed transipiring like mad and using up all the water..............i'll keep an eye on it anyway, if it's a leak it's a slow one so i can just keep filling it up.............