I noticed this morning that unlike the back garden the autumn leaves in the front garden are predominantly yellow. Whilst I do like the fiery reds of autumn I find the buttery yellows quite soothing.
The beech hedge along one of my boundaries particularly intrigues me. If you look at the photograph above you will see that one end has already turned a dry copper and then as you come up the hedge the color goes through yellow to green. I think there are two possible reasons for this range of color change in such a short space. Firstly the soil were the leaves have completely turned is much drier than the green end which is also in shade. Secondly, we had to replace most of the far end of the hedge a year after planting as the first set of plants didn’t take. The nursery we got them from were happy to replace them free of charge as they had lost quite a few – I think it was a very dry summer the year before or something. So maybe the second lot of beech aren’t as established as the first and therefore have turned quicker. Either way I do like the gradual change it looks a bit like a color chart.
I also have a Mountain Ash or Sorbus in the front garden. Whilst the leaves do have an orangey tinge to them they are going more yellow than anything else. The few remaining red berries really stand out against the paler foliage.
The Mountain Ash is only about 4 or 5 years old and I bought it as little more than a stick but it is beginning to have a nice shape and is really beginning to put on some growth now.
Even the Euphorbia griffithii is joining in the buttery decline. I do like this plant it just keeps giving from the bright red stems in the spring and the fresh foliage, the orange flowers and now the autumn colours. Even the flowers look nice still in a shabby sort of way.
Even the ‘lawn’ is joining in with buttery mushrooms. I have no idea what these are but we do get a lot of mushrooms in the front grass and I wonder if it has something to do with the roots of a large conifer I had removed a number of years ago. I had the bottom of the trunk ground out but there are many root deep below the grass and they are all slowly rotting so maybe this is what the fungi are living off?
So that is my autumnal front garden – more subtle than the back garden but purely accidental.