Everything is feeling soggy, Not crisp and cold and burnt umber as I was hoping for, just damp. What you have out now is going to be so much more dependent upon where you are than it was in, say, June. If you are up north, it is likely that it is all scarves and hats and the flowers are long gone. As it is, here there are still sweet peas and roses and buckets and buckets of dahlias.

Surprise of the season goes to the Rudbeckia triloba though. I cut it down in the big clear and more out of guilt than anything else, mixed it with armfuls of devil’s bit scabious and bronze fennel (and a simple stem of thalictrum) and put it on the kitchen table to get in the way. When the books arrived, it was delegated even further down to sitting in the corner of the courtyard, the pot filling up with rain and the scabious inelegantly rotting. The rudbeckia on the other hand, has just kept flowering. Tiny little stellar flowers I grant you, but flowering all the same. I rather like them. I found an old packet of seed in a studio clear out yesterday and they are going right back on the list for next season. (My camera roll says that it was cut on 22 August. To still be giving colour and happiness some six weeks later is quite some vase life.)

Other things looking glorious right now are the Hopi sunflowers. All the big heads have been harvested and are in the dry, waiting for the seeds to be removed and stored. This means that there are tiny little side shoots of flowers which I find very sweet. The colour of these is so incredibly warm, although I cannot make up my mind about whether to put it in a vase or use the petals for bundle dyeing.) Also, because I have been rather slack at weeding in certain areas this year, the most perfect daucus carota has emerged just by the back gate.

Even better than all of those things are the sweet peas. I have cut about four for the house all summer and my discipline has been rewarded in spades, not only by pods and pods of seed, but also by flowers that just seems to keep on going, I have spoken before about my love of imperfection, and at this time of year, in all of this rain and wind, the mottling is amazing. The lowest one in the picture is called ‘flake’ and I am seriously considering whether I like it even more than Nimbus. And I never thought I would say that about any lathyrus odoratus..

The dahlia is creme de cassis. Not quite so sure I love that one, but I cannot question its generosity.