Autumn in a bubble

When I went out this morning to tidy up my messy garden, I looked hard and thought - it's actually not messy at all!   It's simply what happens in May, so instead of cutting back and tidying as I had planned, I grabbed my camera and started taking photos.    You can see the results below. 
​This change of heart was in part, inspired after I had watched the film - 

'Five Seasons: the Gardens of Piet Oudolf'. ​

Piet Oudolf is an influential Dutch garden designer, plant nursery man and author. He is a leading figure of the "New Perennial" movement and designs plant compositions using bold drifts of herbaceous perennials and grasses which are chosen at least as much for their structure as for their flower colour.​  He designed the planting for the famous High Line Garden in New York  as well as many other well known gardens in North America, Northern Europe and Britain.  One of his most  acclaimed gardens in Britain is the Hauser and Wirth garden in Somerset called Oudolf Fields.  He believes in appreciating the long lived beauty of a plant, lasting well beyond its flowering period into its reproductive seedhead phase and beyond into decay.  

I have left the seedheads of Queen Annes Lace, Michelmas Daisies, Orach, and Lychnis still with the occasional spot of magenta, also some Echinacea seed-heads to better appreciate the beauty of Autumn decay

I must have been mad to even think of tidying away this glorious tangle of seedheads, as it is beautiful. It's just a matter of attuning our eyes to seeing this as beauty and not mess! Besides if I cut it all away, what would there be left - nothing!

  
We so often think of colour in autumn, and it's true - the fiery crimsons, golds and oranges of autumn foliage are a sight to behold.  But so are the browns and bleached out beige's of dried seedheads and decay.  It is in these understated dried plant skeletons that we can now easily see the structures and shape, and as Piet Oudolf says that, too, is to be appreciated. 

But we can't have a story about autumn without colour so here goes!

One of the loveliest things about autumn is the light - the long slanting shadows and the iridescence of pinks and golds in autumn leaves as sunlight filters through. The few leaves left hanging on the Cercis 'Forest Pansy' and small Tree Peony have turned into jewels as sunlight filters through them, and the Ornamental Grape. Even the the distinctive leaves (see right) of the Oak Leafed Hydrangea - Hydrangea quercifolia are burnished bronze

The above colour is in my face, a footstep away in my own small garden, well within my bubble!   But beyond is the wider bubble!  I can walk to the city if I choose, and what autumn treats there are to discover on the way.  And all within my bubble!

From Manchester Street, just across the Avon is the Margaret Mahey Playground which looked very bare after beautiful mature trees were removed from the site to build this playground. Margaret Mahey would have turned in her grave had she known the site was to be stripped bare of it's natural habitat in order to build such a contrived plastic playground in her name.

The Poplar Walk bordering the Avon River between Madras and Manchester Streets finishing alongside the Margaret Mahey Playground. But the playground looks sadly bare after the natural habitat and mature trees were removed from the site to build it. Margaret Mahey loved wild and natural places and wrote about these places for children so they could use their own imaginations in making up their own games. I can't imagine that brightly coloured plastic would have been part of her intention.

Also within my bubble is the Red Zone and the wide open spaces this offers alongside the Avon river and environs.  So yesterday for my daily walk, I turned east instead of west into more beautiful tree lined river landscapes flaunting their autumn colours and the further east I went, the more the vistas opened out into ever widening empty landscapes. 
Yet within these open landscapes, there are rectangular lines of shrubs and trees delineating the gardens which had once been there and the sadly bare central spaces within these boundaries where peoples homes had  been before they were demolished. 
It's  an eerie sight and an eerie feeling as you can almost hear the ghostly sounds of absent people - the voices of children playing, lawns being mown, cars pulling into driveways and neighbours calling to each other as they went about their daily business. 
​Where there had been active and thriving communities, there is now nothing except ghostly rectangular outlines of shrubs which once enclosed someones home. 

The further east I walked the more the old earthquaked road narrowed and became more rutted, and the wide open spaces of before began to close in again with more mature trees. I realised I was coming to something special and sure enough planter boxes appeared along the track and pots with flowers spilling out of them, and there were signs and steps up to a sheltered garden raised slightly above the road.  It was the entrance to the Richmond Community Garden.

The Richmond Community Garden still looking good, even though no volunteers have been allowed to work in the garden for almost six weeks due to the lockdown. This has been difficult for community gardens as March and April is the time that seeds are sown and seedlings planted for winter crops. We just hope some activity can happen soon, so they can bring their gardens back into production again

I'm fortunate in my bubble, as there are many places within  walking distance, and those pictured above are just some of them.