Autumn Fun From My Garden

At this time of year in this hemisphere, we focus on the dead (All Hallow's Eve/All Saints/All Souls/Día de Muertos) and on the dying of the light, the dying of the year, the passing of summer.  Liking to buck trends, today I'll focus on living and beginning against the odds, living among the dying, or at least dying beautifully.  How's that for a theme to string together a bunch of random photos?    

This unnamed dahlia, picked up in a four inch pot, longing to be set free in larger quarters, has rewarded me with lots of these cool blooms and continues to pump them out, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it's cold outside.  Maybe it's quite aware and hoping to reproduce before it goes dormant for the year.  Someone keeps cutting the spent flowers,  undoubtedly frustrating the plant to no end.  This tuber is a keeper! 

Some of the repeat blooming roses are still going at it like 'Marjie,' a sport of 'Cecile Brunner.'

A fun jumble of stuff.  Abutilon megapotamicum on the left is blooming in colors that go very well with the oranges of the Acer foliage.  Smoke tree on the right with rain covered "smoke."

New violas will share their sunny little faces all winter long and into the summer.  Hopefully they'll be happy and seed around if they can find any empty space, a rarity in my cramscaped garden.

Every year's surprise is which tropaeolum speciosum will have lived/died, where it'll pop up & if it'll bloom or not.  More surprising is the survival of this one in a pot and the fact that it just started blooming in the fall. The large terra cotta pot in which it was planted to climb up a very blue Chamaecyparis lawsoniana 'Van Pelt's Blue' which Squak Mountain Nursery's website describes as "Simply a ravishing narrowly columnar accent or articulation plant with the most breathtaking powdery blue sprays of fine foliage."  More surprising because the pot crashed down and broke during a winter storm and wasn't repotted for a week or so.  Something (too much water during this summer's heat wave?) killed the Port Orford Cedar but the tropaeolum speciosum came back with gusto and climbed the evergreen(well everbrown now.)  Perhaps, once frost claims the tropaeolum, I'll spray paint the dead cedar.  I'm afraid to try and replace it as I don't want to disturb the tropaeolum roots.  More tasteful options might be to simply cut the tree to soil level and replace it with a trellis or put another evergreen in a pot atop the grave of the previous one.

The others all bloomed at the "correct" time this summer.

The promise of more to come.

Come on mild winter!

My persimmon tree, freed from the shade by this year's timber bamboo grove reduction, finally set fruit which was starting to color up nicely.  Dreams of seeing the bare branches laden with mouth watering persimmons after leaf fall and enjoying home grown fruit were dashed when the squirrels, quite numerous since the leaving of our previous neighbor, who trapped and relocated or shot them, decided to beat me to it. Okay, this doesn't fit the theme.

Alien-looking buds of Fatsia japonica always thrill!

Acer japonicum 'Green Cascade' is putting on quite a nice color show. 

Pots by the back steps, mostly occupied in the summer by tender plants are mostly ready for winter. The gardener needs to plant a couple of black plastic pots in the ground and the others need to be planted in the ceramic pots in which they're sitting. The objet d'crap also need to be rearranged as well and maybe that misfit brown pot moved to a different location.  Gardening's a process, right?

Glass mulch.  The self-imposed rule was that none of these could cost more than a dollar.  They were sitting around already, having been found at the dollar store, on the side of the road in "free stuff" boxes, and at Bedrock Industries. The moss covered concrete sphere in the back appeared in my back alley a couple of years ago. All are less than seconds with major flaws, cracks, dings that are against the soil.

What's thrilling/disappointing you in your garden this autumn?