September began with both July and August's weather themes of being cool, cloudy and with quite a number of rainy days. A brief interlude of sunny days early in the month allowed a few garden butterflies to appear around the Buddleia flowers, and eventually we hit our magic Welsh fifteen moment on September 7 th, which is over 2 weeks later than usual, and numbers never achieved the normal clouds – last year there were often over 100 in this area of the garden at any one time.
However on these couple of sunny days I did have a fleeting view of a Holly Blue, flibutting high up around the ivy, clambering up our tall totem poled spruce.
Though widely reported as a good year for a bumper apple crop in the UK, this was not the case here, in part because of the weather, and in part because inadequate pruning, on my part, of the trees and lower hedge meant poor air circulation in this part of the garden which increased fungal disease.
However vegetables, Clematis and Hydrangeas have all continued to delight us, and towards the end of the month, those autumnal harbingers, Cyclamen hederifolium, started to illuminate the garden.
Finally around September 23rd, a high pressure system at last built over the UK – the only one this summer, it seems. The rain pretty much stopped falling, (an eventual total of 105.8 mm for the month) and the sun showed its face a bit more, and then all day, though temperatures weren't really warm enough to justify it being called an Indian summer, and many days had a little bit of cloud cover.
But this dry spell continued right to the end of the month, and fortunately we had clear skies at 3.00 am on Monday September 28th, for the extremely rare last in a tetrad of super moon lunar eclipses… Entirely worthwhile setting the alarm for, as the larger than usual perigee full moon changed from bright silver to dim rusty gold, on a chilly night of stillness and quiet so complete, that the first drying leaves falling from the big oak could be clearly heard clattering to the ground… Finally a special month for wildlife sightings, even if the swallows all left really early and without fuss . A shortage of insects, or do they know something about the weather ahead?
A Goshawk attack in the turkey run … and a common lizard inquisitive about my bulb planting, basking on the rusty chicken..