One more month has passed away. We are quickly approaching a cold season. During the last week the end of beautiful golden autumn has become more and more evident. Golden leaves started to fall and turn brown, and just in few days colourful and spruce trees uncovered their bare branches.  My garden is slowly turning brown too. If I try to make a comprehensive review about what’s blooming now in my garden, this GBBD post would be about little single blooms.

I am not sure what word would suit to characterize this autumn – maybe “restrained”. There was no real warm Indian summer this year but temperatures were pretty mild. We already had a week of frost but they were tender so my asters survived them very well. However in general my garden is much drearier this year than a year before.  The warm summer did its job and many of my late bloomers stopped blooming earlier. My roses declined early because of my experiment not to use any pest this year. They were just completely eaten.

My borders look messy with dead seedheads and grasses, bare stems of roses, and random single blooms. The only plant which helps to sew this mix-up over is Verbena bonariensis. Thank her for that.

However what I really like about my garden this October is colour of the foliage. The colours are extremely bright. For example I’ve never considered Siberian irises to make big impact in fall garden, but now they are just shining with yellow. As well as daylilies – leaves of Hemerocallis ‘Stella de Oro’ are as bright as its blooms.

But this is a Bloom Day post, so let’s talk about blooms. This autumn gave me opportunity to enjoy my asters in full bloom. Last year I almost considered removing Symphyotrichum dumosum ‘Rosenwichteln’ from my garden. It was so late that blooms come almost together with the snow. But this plant rehabbed this year, and not because of its blooms but because of its foliage. What a nice groundcover it is! No weed could manage to poke its head through the dense bushes of this aster. Maybe because of this rediscovered sympathy this aster complimented with carpet of blooms.

I like company of Symphyotrichum lateriflorum ‘Lady in Black’ and Aster pyranaeus ‘Lutetia’ very much. It is hard to expect ‘Lady in black” turn in to full bloom in my climate zone but it is so graceful that I always will find some place for it in my garden.

Symphyotrichum novi-belgii ‘White ladies’ are new in my garden. This spring I bought almost only white plants with idea to purify colour schemes in my garden. My grand plans failed this year – I could not manage to make planned new beds so all my new plants were temporary planted in random empty spaces. But look how nicely this white aster plays with blue Geranium ‘Nimbus’ eyes.

Frankly I feel a little bit burned-out about my garden. I started this season with so many plans and pretty quickly it turned out that they are so slow to be accomplished. I spent all the summer fighting with different landscaping obstacles. Here is how my expanded garden looks like.

The positive side of this – I have an absolutely empty canvas to paint in long winter evenings 🙂

Happy GBBD! I hope you have more blooms in your gardens and as usually I will add more items to my plants wish list while reading your posts. Thanks for sharing you ideas, experience and knowledge. Let’s meet at Carols May Dreams Garden.