When we arrived back at Burnbrae on Tuesday I was pleased to find the cold wind had not yet stripped all the trees and was leaving a pretty carpet below.
A poem for today
This week I read The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy. The first stanza is so typical of a winter's evening in the mountains.
"I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires."
It is a big job to rake up (or mow) the leaves and place them in compost bins. We have just spent the Queen's birthday holiday doing this job and there are still more leaves to fall from the trees!
ReplyDeleteSince I am a lazy gardener and mine is a wild garden with not much fuss with tidiness there is not a lot of work.
Delete1. Most of the big trees are situated over garden beds so the leaves fall there and compost the beds.
2. I wait until all of the leaves have fallen then do my last mow for the year without a catcher on ... hence cleaning up the leaves and feeding the lawn.
3. I blow all of the leaves on the hard surfaces onto the nearest garden bed. My battery blower from Bunnings is light, powerful and not very noisy.
4. At the same time as blowing the paths will clean up all of the little pine cones and yellow pollen that fell weeks ago - I have just left them messy until my big cleanup.
Oh la! Too beautiful Joan Elizabeth, what a lovely sight to come back to. I wouldn't even mind taking the leaves 😉
ReplyDeleteAs described above, the garden beds get all of the leaves.
DeleteIt looks beautiful! When I was "young" we took a rake to gather it all. These days people use those noisy things (I don´t even know the German word) to blow thhe leaves into a corner...
ReplyDeleteBetter enjoy the view!
Ha ha. I am one of the people who use the "noisy thing" to clear the hard surfaces. It is battery powered however so nowhere near as noisy as the old petrol versions - and much better and quicker at the job.
DeletePretty fall colours!
ReplyDeleteI agree.
DeleteBeautiful
ReplyDeleteBeautiful but short. That is of course the fun of it, waiting for the display each year.
DeleteThat tree is gorgeous. Beautiful colors and nicely shaped.
ReplyDeleteI think Japanese maples do make nice shapes, they have a way of reaching out. This is quite a young one (which is relative as it was a small tree when we moved here 25 years ago) but there are much larger, much older ones elsewhere in the garden. Unfortunately a few have died in the past couple of years.
DeleteSuch a beautiful picture of the tree and its carpet. Relevant poem too.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing like autumn leaves to stir a Queenslander's heart.
DeleteI thought that dreadful wind would strip all the leaves off our pecan nut tree but there are still a few left. We will have a lot of them to rake up and make mulch out of...when I get energetic enough :-)
ReplyDeleteJust mow them (see my first reply above) saves raking which much too much work for me.
DeleteSpectacular! Enjoy the leaves while they last.
ReplyDeleteThey are nearly all gone now, though the big liquid amber at the back is only just starting - but is mostly out of my view from the house so doesn't get my attention.
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