Winter, in the form of Thursday's first hard ground frost and some bitterly cold northerly winds yesterday, may have arrived but everywhere there are still plenty of reminders of a fading summer. This self heal was growing quite happily in the coarse gravel at the side of one of the forestry tracks with no companion to keep it company.
The heathers are hanging on grimly, it seems to me, much later in the year than usual, and this is particularly true of the cross-leaved heaths which - according to my memory anyway - are usually the first of the heathers to disappear.
Some devil's-bit scabious are still in flower but all of them are the usual lilac colour, so this will have been the first year I've not seen either of the pink or white variants.
In the places I wander there's been a significant lack of blueberries. There's an area in the coniferous plantation at the back of our house which is usually good for collecting these berries but this year they are absent - it took some minutes' searching to find this one, wizened berry.
The best evidence of a prolonged warm summer comes from the four sunflowers Mrs MW insisted on planting in the spring - each year I regularly tell her she's wasting her time - which have withstood the recent gales and the first frost to continue cheerfully flowering against our fence.
Then, in amongst all the many flowering species which are giving up for the winter, we find this, a gorse which is just coming into flower. I love the idea that this prickly and otherwise generally unlikeable and very invasive plant will be giving us brilliant splashes of egg-yolk yellow in our hedgerows throughout the bitter months to come.
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