Hanging in there

As usual, as the weather cools and the garden is supposed to be winding down, ours has not read the textbooks and is continuing to flower merrily away as if it were spring. Only the sudden absence of the frogs suggests any change - there is still the occasional splosh to tell us they're still there, but they don't come up to pose for photos any more. Late flowers have arrived: the heliotrope

and the tobacco plants that Shirley gave us:

while the morning glory by the back door has started to flower just as all the others have finished and gone over:

and the prostrate rosemary is having a second flush of flowers - but the first was in January, so for a Mediterranean herb it is behaving very strangely.

The California poppies also had another brief blaze of glory:

This year we seem to have grown an awful lot of these:

but sadly we have not yet figured out how to cook them. Unfortunately one of them landed right on the apple tree and bashed half the apples off, it was already a bit unstable and we had planned to move it backwards a bit, so we have, but it looks really unhappy so I hope it doesn't just die. The other one next to the fennel looks really well and has produced lots of apples this year, just needs a new stake instead of being tied up with rope.......