I am very late posting anything this week due to a lovely family weekend and more activity than is normal. Having missed the IAVM this week on Cathy’s Rambling in the Garden blog, where we share our garden flower arrangements, I thought a little gathering of all the late flowers might be appropriate anyway.

It absolutely feels like fall now, – .5C this am and a low mist hung in the air over the now quickly yellowing leaves. Sky was brilliant blue for my morning hike and I actually wore dollar store gloves for the first part of the walk. You know the ones, thin acrylic and perfect to take the chill off, not ski mitts just yet!

This last ten days I have put together a few flowers for the house. I always feel a room is ‘dead’ without flowers so I although I had them I did not get round to augmenting with a few words! So here they are – no titles, just samples of the dwindling blooms and a taste of what fall is looking like in the Kootenays. As part of my Spotlight series I will do a Spotlight on the tall, deep purple, gorgeous fall Monkshood, Aconitum carmichaelgii, later this week as it is such a beautiful plant for October. Our local Gallery has a new exhibit coming in with the work of Michael Hepher. It is entitled ‘The Geometry of Nature’ so I put a few dry seed heads together to exemplify the spheres, ovals, spirals and curves we can see so easily now on the skeletons of former greenery.

As you can see my greenhouse is adorned with a few dried flowers to use in the next weeks. The Chinese Lanterns, Physalis Alkekengi, blobs of orange on the rack were disappointing this year as the deer found them and ate most of the greenery. I keep this fast moving spreader in a tiny contained piece of my front garden, which is at the top of several steps and up against the house. Nothing deters these beasts anymore.

I still keep thinking of all those in the path of Helene whose gardens were washed away. Wishing you all fast healing from the storm with the help you need.