It’s now not just officially Autumn but my garden here in Lewes UK agrees. It has decided to prove that Autumn can be every bit as colourful as Summer and, this year, it looks better than ever.

I’m enjoying the mix of little red apples and dahlias with a sprinkling of crimson nasturtiums. I’ve always tried to conjure an illusion of jungle-wildness in my gardens while maintaining discrete control.

I’ve already eaten a few of these little apples, nearly ripe windfalls, and I’m soon to harvest them. The variety is Croquella and even if the fruit tasted like wax, which it doesn’t, I’d still grow this great little drawf tree as it looks so joyful when covered in fruit.

My espalier Bramley cooking apple is fruiting up well too.

The dahlias have been as joyful as those little red apples and they’ve bee alive with bees since mid-Summer. I prefer the daisy shaped varieties as do the bees.

These two are pleasant variations on a pink theme.

They red nasturtiums are a bold contrast but one that works for me.

Autumn is also garden spider time here in Lewes and often walking out there is like weaving through a series of net curtains. Horace, my old friend, is back and bolder than ever.

The daisies are mood enhancers too at this time of year. They start flowering in late spring and cary on until the frosts. They’re patients companions too for their wayward nasturtium neighbours.

The pyracantha berries have now taken over the old flint wall in the darkest part of the garden. They act like a street lamp brightening up everything around them.

Like the roses and all the other plants in this garden, the pyracantha only arrived here four years ago as a tiny plant to take its place when I started the whole garden from scratch. The roses were magnificent first time round this summer and now they’re coming back for a second flush.

I’m particularly happy to see Benjamin Britten again….

…as well as Claire Austin…

…Mortimer Sackler…

…and, one of my favourites, the richly coloured Falstaff. All my roses are highly perfumed and, maybe I imagine this, but they seem to have an even stronger perfume after rain.

They won’t last forever of course so I’m going to enjoy them before winter takes its turn out there.

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The weather may have turned pretty grey and wet here in Lewes, UK, but there was compensation in that apple pie baked freshly from newly plucked Bramley apples for the espalier tree in my garden.

My mini-harvest is now over for another year but no less satisfying for being on a small scale.

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When I was a small child I was mildly obsessed by my father’s ancient collection of old 78 rpm gramophone records which, if I was very lucky he would play some of them for me on a slightly more modern piece of furniture called a “radiogram” that could take these wonderful old recordings from the 1920s and 30s if he changed the record-player’s stylus from the default one made from an industrial diamond to an old-fashioned metal needle. They were mostly old dance band songs with exotic sounding singers with pre-historic accents and one of them, which comes back into my mind for the first time in years, was a song called “You’ll be mine in apple blossom time.”

The memory returned whilst I was photographing my radiantly beautiful apple blossom here in my small town garden in Lewes, UK and I was inspired to try and find the record on YouTube. Yes, amazingly, it was there and you can hear it too if you scroll down to the bottom of this page. Even though the lyricist thought apple blossom time is in June and even though the recording is decidedly low-tech, it has all the poignancy, for me anyway, that Noel Coward admired in “cheap music.”

I planted my two apple trees last year, one a dwarf eating apple and the other an espalier Bramley cooking apple, but it is only this year, by the look of the blossom, that I will get the first fruits.

Even if I am to be forever apple-free, it will have been worth the planting just for this glorious display.

It was great too that, this year, the apple has synchronised with the cherry blossom – the two most beautiful, in my opinion. My little cherry tree is three years old now and has never looked so laden in flowers and the perfume, standing out there this morning is intoxicating. Last night, when the windows were closed, the bee in this photograph was left stranded in the house and, this morning it looked pretty pathetic crawling around on the study floor. I wondered if I could save it by putting it on the cherry blossom and, rather satisfyingly, he went straight to work on the nectar, feasting there or 15 or 20 minutes before flying off looking fully recovered.

It was the healing power of blossom that works on my soul too. No wonder those lovers of long ago sang of meeting in apple blossom time. I am sad though if they were from round here and waited until June – it will all be over by the end of April but that, I guess, wouldn’t have fitted the rhyming pattern. Anyway, here is that old song in its 1931 recording:

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