We have had another dry, glorious week of autumnal sunshine. It’s far cooler in the mornings, with heavy dew on the grass and by 7.30in the evening the light is fading fast. Autumn is in the air. The large acer at the top of the big lawn has already lost its leaves and other dry and stressed shrubs around the garden are turning to their autumn colours very quickly.

I walked on the hill today, where the farmers had been cutting and baling the rust, brown bracken for cattle bedding, and happened upon this amazing crop of crab apples on the fence line. It’s the time of year when ones natural instinct is too “squirrel “ stuff away for the coming winter months. I have been bagging surplus vegetables for the freezer. Perhaps I should go back up with a bag to get crab apples and make jelly.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

BY ROBERT FROST

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

It is going to be a long, long winter if we go into another lockdown.