Here we are in the middle of autumn and the summer has finally passed, although it put up a hell of a fight this year, not wanting to end. We've experienced a very warm April indeed, making autumn a lot shorter, and now we're in May, still getting lots of sunny warm days, but at least the mornings and evenings are nice and chilly.
And I am pleased to report that our fern garden out the front of the house has become nicely established. All inmates are healthy and happy, and to celebrate the successful completion of Phase One of the fern garden project, this afternoon we introduced two caretaker gnomes to oversee the coming winter. (Hopefully, if you click on the photo it will come up a lot bigger).
Hard to see, are they? Of course they're hard to see, because we've put them well into the centre of the front garden, where there are lots of spider webs to deter cowardly thieves.
Now, I don't want to be too snobby about gnomes, because we love all our gnomes equally in our little Utopian democracy here in Amateur-Land, but not to put too fine a point on it ... these are our two most expendable gnomes. Or if you prefer, our worst gnomes, but I really don't like that kind of ugly language.
The gnome on the right, with the bright red hat, is Stumpy. He suffered a nasty accident in the garden shed a while back, while being repainted. Stumpy fell about three feet off the painting table onto the shed's hard concrete floor, shattering his left hand and his left foot into so many tiny little fragments that there was no hope of gluing anything back on. So I have buried Stumpy deep into the mulch, where his missing limbs can't be seen. Should a thief ever crawl through the spider webs to nick Stumpy, I hope the sight of his ghastly handless & footless condition gives them a fright.
The gnome on the left, Spruiky, is a very humble plastic one, an advertising press release handout from Seasol, with the inscription "Don't Forget the Seasol" plastered on the rock that he's sitting on. He might lack the class of a true concrete gnome, but he seems to like his work and I hope he has a long career as a fern caretaker.
Now, all the fern garden has to do is survive winter, get seriously bigger next spring, and I think I can call our little fern garden project a success. Thank you Pammy for suggesting it in the first place!
