Plant-a-glow-glow*

October’s shortening days can fill me with autumnal gloom or delight with a blaze of brilliant colour - sometimes both in one day. A forty-eight hour spell of misery-inducing rain was followed by three perfect days earlier this week. I spent every possible moment outside, alternating between slow, steady work, and stopping to try and photograph the extraordinary warmth of the light. But no photo is worthy of it, in truth. Better to try and stay in the moment, soak it up and store the memory for a dank and dreary November afternoon.

The light seems soft and diffuse so that everything glows evenly, simultaneously. It’s hard to explain and harder to describe. Perhaps the low sun lights up leaves from beneath rather than from above, sending colour bouncing upwards through the foliage. Whatever the cause, the effect is quite magical.

Below is an Aster that I’m sure is a random seedling. It’s tall, sturdy and has been in flower continuously since late August. A few weeks ago I nicknamed it ‘August Queen’, but she could as easily become ‘November Princess’ - I’m sure she’ll still be going strong then. The softly out-of-focus amber tree behind is Cercidiphyllum japonicum, better known as the ‘Toffee Apple tree’. At the first touch of cold nights, it releases its sugars, sending invisible wafts of candy floss across the garden and with it wobbly memories of funfairs - hoopla, dodgems, wriggling goldfish in thin plastic bags and fearsome women, their heavy earrings pulling holes in their earlobes so large you can see right through.

Asters are rightly famed for their autumn show, but they’re not the only plants delighting us in the garden this week. I counted 39 plants in flower, not including berries, fruits and glowing leaves. A select few have waited until October to flower for the first time, like Leucanthemella serotina, below. She spends all summer slowly extending green stems up through the plants around, and then in the week we shut the doors, unfurls the first of those pristine white flowers, glistening with dew, to face the rising sun.

Others have been flowering for weeks, now slowly fading as the temperature drops. Echinacaea ‘Rubinstern’ opens crisply pink in July, each flower fading slowly over the weeks until they resemble old taffeta, weathered at the petal tips like a long silk gown trailed carelessly across the ground.

But the two plants bringing me the most delight now are both close to the house, clearly visible from a kitchen window.

The first is Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’. Tall, confident and smothered in smart flowers for at least two months, it oozes sunshine and cheerfulness. Ours is planted next to a black bamboo and the two seem to be very happy partners, quite the equal of one another.

The other is uniquely pretty and near impossible to capture on a photograph. It’s a Persicaria, hopelessly hampered by the name Persicaria virginiana var filiformis. My close bond with the RHS means I feel I must stick to the correct nomenclature, but this plant is crying out to be called ‘Neon Lights’, or ‘Ruby Sparkles’ or something equally compelling. Ben Ranyard of Higgledy Garden fame would have no hesitation in christening it with something unofficial and more fitting, I’m certain.

The leaves carry the characteristic ‘chevron’ markings of similar Persicarias, but in September, long wands of tiny, glowing, ruby flowers appear, each flower enclosing a little creamy seed. Backlit, the effect is spectacular, as if the air dances with tiny red fireflies.

The plant has one downside - each of those tiny little seeds is perfectly fertile and will grow where it lands, creating a little forest of prettily marked seedlings in spring. Still, they are easy enough to fish out and of course, we will pot many of them up for sale later in the year.

With the garden closed for the winter, we will leave large areas of it untouched for a few weeks - no dead-heading, no cutting back, minimal weeding and just a quick fly-by with the mower if the lawns gets out of hand. The butterflies, bees and birds can have the run of it by day, the moths, bats and hedgehogs by night. It’s their turn now.

But there’s no harm in just looking, or taking photographs, is there? I’ll leave you with a little collage of autumnal colour. Reading left to right from the top: Salvia uliginosa, Geranium ‘Ankum’s Pride’, Viburnum plicatum ‘Mariesii’, Crocus sativus (Saffron Crocus - yes I have collected a few fronds….), Darmera peltata, Persicaria vaccinifolia, Tithonia rotundifolia, Pentstemon ‘Shoenholzeri’ and lastly the startling white berries of Actaea pachypoda.

*Oh - the heading? Well, partly inspired by our good friends Vicky and Richard Fox from Plantagogo, of course.

But is there some other connection lurking in the back of your memory? A tune, a beat - off-beat - perhaps? It might be this, from the appropriately named but otherwise totally forgotten ‘Landscape’. Mad, isn’t it…