We’ve had frost. Yippee! Some more please, dear weather gods. We gardeners need to have this year’s slug population explosion well and truly blasted, or nipped in the bud, or whatever you need to do to stop the critters chomping and reproducing. And yes, I know they are useful in the compost heap, and I’m sure other slugs love them, but enough is enough. They are roosting everywhere, including in the polytunnel. No vegetable is safe.

Of course more frost will mean an end to the late flowering flowers – the campanula and geranium Rozanne still on the go, the hesperanthus (above) which simply refused to give in to the frost; the Russian rudbeckia that, astonishingly, is currently contemplating the making of fresh, fat russet buds. (It must have been bred in deepest Siberia). The annual pot marigolds are still busy too.

But heavens to Murgatroyd, much as we like to keep seeing them, surely it is time all good plants were asleep in their beds, gathering themselves for next summer’s flowering. In the meantime, though, here are scenes of the garden’s last hurrah – taken today and over the last week.

The Changing Seasons Please visit Max to see his wonderfully atmospheric shots of night-time Oslo.

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