Sunny flowers

This scene couldn’t have been left unrecorded. We found it a few days ago when visiting the Kuusisto Manor I posted about in June (here). As the stems were rather high and quite far apart I couldn’t help taking a walk among them.

Overall, the sunflower is one of the most fabulous flowering plants to me. The ‘flower’, in fact, consists of an outer circle of yellow ray flowers, generally regarded as the ‘petals’, and a central flower head with hundreds of tiny disk flowers in a perfect spiral pattern.

I read it is a legend the sunflower would always turn the flower head towards the sun. The immature buds do follow the sun whereas the mature flowering heads face a fixed, often easterly, direction throughout the day. The below is a close-up of the five-petalled disk flowers or florets. An amazing plant, isn’t it? 

The field was such a big one I believe these sunflowers are being grown for the seeds. But I am wondering how the harvesting will work out when all the phases of reproduction from baby buds to seed formation are still found in the field. Even today, it is a challenging and risky occupation to be a farmer.

Wet icing

I did mention something about snow on my previous post but I certainly didn’t wish for the sleet and slush that have been troubling us since the weekend. There is no point having a snow cover if it is as wet as rain and comes with a thick cloud cover meaning more days without any sunshine.

Hubby took these photos a couple of days ago when he walked to the mailbox at around 9 am. I’m afraid we haven’t had it much brighter than this in days, perhaps weeks.

The white icing was so heavy on the trees and shrubs I had to carry out some lilac rescue as I noticed we had already lost a couple of trunks. Plus the top of a birch. Soon all this will be gone and we’ll be back to the even more depressing grey darkness sprinkled with rainfall. How could anyone survive our kind of winter without the festive season?

Multicolours

Of all the trees and bushes with colourful autumn foliage in our garden it is got to be the traditional Midsummer rose (Rosa pimpinellifolia ‘Plena’) that wins in beauty, at least at close range.

This shrub rose if often considered a bit of a nuisance because it spreads so easily that it’s hard to control and is very thorny but not that disease resistant. What’s more, the blooming only lasts for a couple of weeks in early summer.

Nevertheless, if you can take all the pruning, rooting out and insect control you will be rewarded with some fabulous multicoloured foliage. All the brilliant autumn hues from green and yellow to orange and purple will be showing at the same time, sometimes even on a single leaf.

We have some Midsummer roses spreading between the lilacs and the steps to the porch. I also transplanted a few roots at the end of the barn when they had to be moved out of the way once we had a rainwater drainage job done. Their autumn brilliance tends to last longer than that of the other plants. Aren’t I lucky we are still living under the travel ban my man issued almost a year ago? Now I’m able to enjoy the autumn colours in full, unlike most Octobers. The Mediterranean will have to wait.

To see how these roses were in early June click here.

Winter variety

What a difference a week makes. The leaves of the other apple trees have practically fallen by now but those of our only winter variety only just turned yellow.

I will probably not have any apple trees next season, possibly never again, so I must take the most of these decades-old trees while I still can.

We have already had the first night frosts and the dark red winter variety is starting to be mature enough to be collected.