Early autumn pictures

In late summer I had a few weeks where I ran out of ammo to take care of the garden. Everything seemed to be going along nicely, so I just poured water on where plants seemed dry and Mr Thumb mowed the lawn. I couldn't fit any more plants in there and was running out of money anyway. It also seemed like autumn storms must hit Any Minute Now.

I'm still there just a bit, waiting for autumn that doesn't seem inclined to show up. I have no idea when autumn planting should be done - probably now, but I'm even more out of money now. I also feel like if I go to the garden centre I'll just come back with another clueless selection of random plants, which is what the garden now seems to be. We haven't used the garden as much as I thought we would, and I'm the only one in the family who actually enjoyes an outdoor barbicue, so that's a bit wrought.

Anyway, here's a few pictures from a nice weekend morning in the garden.

Little fly warming up on the spiraea.

Prelude to autumn.

When you get the light right, the picture's out of focus...

... and when it's on focus, the light is boring. 

Reaching up

Just... no.

Remember the explosion of a flowerbed full of alchemilla and phlox that looked like this in the not-too-distant past?

Well, after some growth and some heavy rain it turned into a very laid-back explosion.

The alchemilla flowers got tired and decided to lie down, bringing the geraniums and phlox down (for a change). Gaah. The stalks showed no sign of resuming an upright posture even when dry(ish) and were basically getting  smushed against the ground.

As I'm using the past tense you'll have guessed that I took action by removing the heaviest alchemilla flowers - I started out by cutting them all off, then realised it was too much and changed my strategy to thinning, but that wasn't much better, just the worst of both worlds.

The flowerbed now looks like a particularly shoddy explosion that someone half-heartedly tried to tidy up but made it worse.

What should I do? Cut everything off? Cut some things off? Dig the bloody thing up and plant boring but well-behaved bushes?