Summer isn’t over yet – EOMV September

August and September has been 2 months of the best and worst of British weather, right now we are in a settled, good spell and it is said to last for a while. Can’t really talk about an Indian summer yet as we need to be in October or November to call it that, but whatever you call it, I enjoy the nice sunny weather and temperatures around 20 degrees during the day – despite the need for watering my numerous pots in such good weather.

The hype of the last few days has of course been the lunar eclipse, and I have never seen one properly so I decided to try to take some photos of what was promised to be an extraordinary lunar eclipse since it coincided with a super moon this time.

I wish I could have taken a photo like this for example from Canary Wharf here in East London, but nope – it’s not mine, this photo is courtesy Jeremy O’Donnell.

I don’t have a zoom lens, besides it is always better to take photos of the moon together with buildings or other structures to get a sense of scale. So I took this photo with my DSLR, but I didn’t think the moon was much bigger than normal....where is the super moon??

I zoomed in as best I could with my 18-55mm lens, but even blown up the moon didn’t appear very big, and if I had blown it up bigger than this it would have been very pixelated. Not sure how they managed to take the photo of Canary Wharf, it is only 2.7 miles to Canary Wharf from my house so the moon should appear the same size – I wonder if there was some Photoshopping going on in some of those photos online??

OK, so taking photo with my DSLR was out of the question, I don’t know anyone with a powerful zoom lens – I used to know someone with a telescope, but that’s many years ago, I am afraid he is no longer my boyfriend. Could I have contacted him just to borrow a telescope for the occasion?....Hmmm, no, don’t think so, not after no contact for nearly 10 years, so no telescope either :-)

I ended up using my camcorder! Not perfect at all, but it has a better zoom than my DSLR. I filmed the moon eclipse from my back garden, it was dark, cold and took a looooong time – but I had never seen a total moon eclipse before so it was fun to do it. Here in UK the eclipse appeared during the middle of the night and it was 4:30am when I was finished filming. Here’s the whole lot in a short version, cut down and speeded up 5x, to a 1:33 min movie – the 2 ½ hours uncut version would probably have sent you all to sleep :-)

And while we are onto spectacular things on film, I got another one for you, filmed last week. I sat in the garden working in one of the flowerbeds when I spotted a bumblebee behaving strangely. It was walking around on the patio, trying to walk UP the legs of my garden chair. I went in to get my camera, expecting it to have gone by the time I came out again – that’s usually what happens (!!), but it was still there, and I followed the bumblebee crossing the whole patio WALKING! It took 9 minutes to walk across my patio, I have edited that movie down for you so you just get the best bits :-)

I spend a lot of time choosing music for my movies, even though the music is just ‘background music’ it matters a lot to what kind of impression the pictures give - and one tune can set a completely different tone than the other. All my movies are best viewed in HD, even if you are only viewing them in the blog size.

And now, finally photos from my garden, in glorious, sunny weather. I am still sorting out the hard landscaping and trying to get the layout right.

I have 572 plants to put in the ground from my previous garden and I have planted 2 plants so far. Nope, that was not a typo, it should be 2 - TWO plants, that’s all. I wish I could have added a couple of zeros behind the 2 but no, 2 plants in the ground, 570 to go. The two that are in the ground are probably really happy though because they are the 2 roses here in this bed, ‘Vildewe’ and ‘Scepter d’Isle’.

The next thing to get sorted soon is to remove more of the Virginia Creeper on the wall and sort out the shrubs below. Right now the Virginia Creeper is starting to look really beautiful with autumn colours, but I am not keeping it just for the few weeks every year where it looks amazing.

Besides, I still have my little Virginia Creeper Bonsai and it has exactly the same amazing colours in the autumn. This Bonsai is now 11 years old, one I have made from a Parthenocissus henryana.

Last week I read a post at Rusty Duck where Jessica had visited the RHS garden Rosemoor in Devon. If you scroll down to the 7th photo you’ll see what caught my eye in her post, I thought that look with the terracotta urn was very nice and I have been thinking of adding some sort of sculpture to my new garden – but what? And what could I get on my shoestring budget?? When I saw her photo it just said ‘ding’ in my head – I already have a sculpture!

Here is a photo from the living room in my previous house, and in the niche next to the window you can see a big urn. It is actually a cheap terracotta urn from a garden centre I have just sprayed with ‘Aged Gold’ spray paint. In my new house there isn’t any nice niche to put my urn in, in fact, I haven’t really found a place for it so the urn and the dried flowers and grass have been in my shed up until now.

But after seeing Jessica’s photo from Rosemoor I though why not use the urn outside? It should be fine, the spray paint might flake off a bit over the years, but so what, that would just add a rustic look to it :-) So now I got another bed sorted, just have to dig holes for all the plants here, this will be a bed for daylilies at the sunny end and heucheras at the shady end. At least that’s what I think it will be for now. There are pots in my garden playing musical chairs just about every day, they have all moved at least 5 times each since I arrived in May and I am not sure I am finished moving them yet.

This was my garden back when I moved in, in May this year. The garden was filled with crates with plants from my previous garden and half of the main area in the back garden was grassed.

And look at it now! I am grass free again. Phew! I have been sitting on my gardening stool and lifted pieces of lawn, one small piece at the time and carefully crumbling off all soil and worms so all that was left was grass roots which I bagged. It has taken me about 6 weeks to do it all and the result is about 200 litre of nice topsoil that I can use when planting to mix with the clay soil – and of course, nearly 30 bags of turf which my son has been kind enough to drive off to the local recycling station as the council does not collect turf. The paving slabs here are just laid on to the bare ground to test out where to have them, so they are rather higgledy piggledy. The sandbags to the right are for putting under the slabs to straighten everything out, but I don’t think I can do that on my own.

Here’s another before and after shot – this one is from June.

And this is today. I have been pruning here in the shade garden since June, and I am not finished yet, my goodness there’s much to do here! But you can see the difference already. This is really hard work so I do just a little every time I am out working in the garden – 10  minutes of pruning in the shade garden and then I can go on to do more fun things, like sitting on my stool and remove grass....ha! The main difference here is that I can finally walk under the ceanothus’, I have removed a lot of the dead branches and taken off some of the lowest branches. I hope the ceanothus’ will be happy with that, I know they don’t like to be pruned but most of what’s taken off was dead anyway so hopefully they will look spectacular again next spring. I also need to prune the apple tree to the left in the shade garden – the apple tree is of course what’s giving shade here but I think the tree is too dense and should be thinned. That might have an effect on the shade garden though, perhaps I need to rename it ‘The dappled light garden’, or something like that.

And as you can see from this photo, the shade garden gets quite a lot of sun in the afternoon at this time of year, with a low sun streaming in. Soon the apple tree will lose all its leaves and there will be a lot more light and sun here. I might have to re-think what I am going to plant in this part of the garden, good thing everything is still in pots :-)

I have made an End of Month View garden movie this time too, I know that makes it 3 movies for this post, but let’s call it special circumstances, after all, the TV news keep reminding us we won’t have another lunar eclipse with a super moon until 2033. Lunar eclipses however are not rare at all, they happen 2-4 times every year, but best location and weather makes it often difficult to view them. Anyway, here is my garden movie, no night shots and no moons in this one :-)

The music for all the movies was by the composer Leroy Anderson this time, Jazz Pizzicato and Forgotten Dreams for the garden movie, The Last Rose of Summer and March Of The Two Left Feet for the bumblebee movie and Jazz Legato for the Eclipse Moon movie.

I have been living in my new house for 4 1/2 month and I am glad the weather is winding down towards autumn and cooler, wetter weather so I can concentrate on sorting out the garden instead of having to water every day. This was a brief summary of what’s been happening in my garden in September, next post will be on the 15th October for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day.

I am linking this post to Helen at The Patient Gardener’s Weblog.

The good weather will last at least until Sunday, better make the best of it as we never know what’s coming next :-)

Until next time, take care.