'Tis the Last Rose of Summer

It's official. The first day of Autumn is 22nd September.

Tell that to my roses who are blooming their little hearts out. I have several once a year flowerers, which, after a little judicial pruning from an experienced hand ( not mine, Stephen's ), earlier in the year, will flower again in the late Summer early Autumn.

Nay... in fact they will go on till Christmas!

My Madame Isaac Pereire is going great guns ( if one can say this about such a delicate creature ).

It certainly felt like Autumn this morning. There was a decidedly chilly edge here in rural Northants. Right on cue, the Robin is singing his Autumn song - slightly more melancholy than his Spring/ Summer one and this year's baby Sparrows, who use our garden and all it's differing levels as an avian playground, are bobbing around like little round fluffballs. Oh how cute they are!

Never mind the dog....Spot the Sparrow

This year we have had a bumper crop of baby birds. The Sparrows which nest in the eaves of the house opposite have had their usual three clutches and many of them have survived - much to the glee of the local Sparrowhawk. He likes to circle around and keep a beady eye out. But the Sparrows are always it seems, one step ahead and are masters of disguise.
They are extremely hard to pick out against the gravel and from in amongst the foliage of the shrubs and trees, so well camouflaged are they. Now and again the baby Dunnock, pretends to be a Sparrow and hangs around with the flock. He ( or she ) is a real cutie. And very hard to distinguish from the herd. For a good reason in our house, the females are all called Maud and the males, all Crim. ( They are named after characters in a Medieval whodunnit. Well...why ever not?

I've noticed that, this year, most of the babies are female. There are some males but out of our thirty or so surviving chicks we have only about four males. I wonder what this means? Who says that garden birds are declining. Not in this garden they aren't. The curly hazel tree ( left - Corylus contorta ) is to our birds what a bouncy castle is to a three years old. They love it and spend hours a day hopping in and out, sitting nestled amongst the leaves, preening and stretching. I can lose quite a lot of time at my washing up, by standing at the kitchen sink, watching them, chuckling to myself. They are as good as a funny joke any day, for a jolly good laugh.

One by one, they dive over to the pond and take a bath on our little trickle stone, put there specially for the small birds. Back they come bedraggled and darker in colour and one by one they begin their odd little ritual of stretching and waving, preening and primping. Passer domesticus Pilates, I dubbed it! There is, however, always ONE on the lookout for trouble, always one who stays till last, constantly scanning the skies for 'you know who' and who waits until the rest have done their thing, before she too plunges into her bath.
What would these last days of Summer be without my little friends?

Or without the last flowering of the late plants who give a final splurge of colour before the real Autumn display.

Our Sedum - Autumn Joy

I shall try to capture some of this colour in my latest project. I've acquired another embroidery pattern and will work on it in conjunction with my Tapestry stamp piece I spoke of in the last post. This one is MUCH bigger and so requires a very different array of stitches, or the same type of stitch worked in a different way. It's a long time since I did anything so large.

I can do them both together - little and large. This is how far I have got with the tiny one - tiny in that the designs are small.

And this is the beginnings of the larger one. There are some large flowers on here- a Roseworks pattern. Go HERE for the link to their page.

So, I'll try to prolong Summer as long as I can, by embroidering my own flowery season and, when my babies have all grown their adult plumage and have ceased to be quite so cute, I'll look forward to the new batch next Spring!
If you want to listen to the title song of this post....
The Last rose of Summer. 
with Renee Fleming. A little slow but that I think gives it the pathos it has.