Autumn on the Fjord

This is what our back-door garden looks like now -- a tangle of purple. We've got cosmos on the right, loosestrife in the middle and verbena in the back on the left. Dave always complains that we have way too many pink and purple flowers, with purple buddleia, pink persicaria and purple wild geraniums all growing in the same area -- but I kind of like the coordinated colors. We've got orange nasturtiums and geums in the same bed for contrast.

Another volunteer sunflower has bloomed, this one in a hanging basket up in a tree at the side of the garden. Definitely planted by a squirrel or dropped by a bird!

Most of the fox-and-cubs stopped blooming long ago, but this one stuck up a new flower just last week. It's blooming all by itself.

Coincidentally, as I was sitting on our garden bench reading Karl Ove Knausgaard yesterday, I came across a poem in his book by Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge. (Knausgaard was recounting a story about interviewing the elderly Hauge decades earlier for a student newspaper, and Hauge offered to read him a few poems.) Although its descriptions of the natural landscape seem distinctly Scandinavian, it also struck me, sitting in my garden on the verge of autumn, as so appropriate:

Time to Gather In 

These mild days of sun in September.
Time to gather in. There are still tufts
of cranberries in the wood, the rose-hips redden
along the stone dykes, nuts fall at a touch,
and clumps of blackberries gleam in thickets,
thrushes poke about for the last red currants
and the wasp sucks away at the sweet plums.
In the evenings I set my ladder aside and hang
up my basket in the shed. Meagre glaciers
already have a thin covering of new snow.
Lying in bed, I hear the throb of the brisling fishers
on their way out. All night, I know, they'll glide
with staring searchlights up and down the fjord.

(And that, my friends, may be the first time I've ever ended a blog post with the word fjord.)