You know Autumn is closing in when you see lovely flower seed heads like this.

I came across this lovely seedhead when I was out walking my dog with my husband almost two weeks ago on our Canadian Thanksgiving weekend here in Toronto.

We were at a local park that we often go to for long hikes with our Labrador Retriever. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was bright and low in the sky. I saw the seed head with the sun shining behind it and knew I had to take a photo. I hope that you appreciate it’s simple beauty as much as I do.

It seems to me that Helebores love their shade so much that even their flowers try to shy away from the light. I only have one Helebore plant left (I did have three once but two seem to have died out) and it’s flowers, when they bloom in late March or April, always hang their lovely faces downward.

It’s a shame because the flowers are so lovely. Delicate, pink, sweet.

To take a good picture of a Helebore bloom I often have to use one of my hands to push the flower stem backwards in order to get the flower to face upward or at least horizontal while I maneuver the camera with my other hand. It’s not easy! LOL

Do you ever have to do some strange moves to get the picture that you’re going for?

These beautiful blue Glories of the snow are pretty much done blooming now. They came up so early this year … like near the beginning of April instead of mid to late April like they usually do!

I have several clumps of these flowers in white, pink and this lovely blue. Each year the clumps seem to get bigger and bigger. I guess I’ll have to try to separate the clumps some time in the near future. I have a few bare areas of my garden (it’s pretty full but there’s a few empty spaces) and I could put some of the divided clumps in these areas. At least in Spring they’d be full and lush!

How is your garden doing this spring? Any flowers blooming yet?

All of the spring flowers in my garden are coming up earlier than they usually do!

My crocuses came up on March 15th and bloomed until about the middle of April. They usually come up toward the end of March, but we had a beautiful winter this year with much warmer than average temperatures (above freezing most of the time) and absolutely NO snow in March at all! We set records!

So no wonder all my plants are ahead of themselves, eh?

Right now my garden has Tulips, Daffodils, Muscarii, Hyacinth and more in bloom and my roses are and many other perennial plants are all leafed out. All of these plants have been active and showing signs of life since mid to late March and the flowers that I just said were blooming started blooming in early April! Way earlier than normal.

How’s your garden this year? I know that a lot of my readers in the US had a terrible winter with lots of snow … but most of us here in The Great White North (Canada) had a fantastic winter with very little snow (uh remember the Olympics?).

I know, I’m gloating .. but we usually have worse winters than most, so give me this one, would ya?

I took this photo of my rose, Therese Bugnet, when it’s red branches were lightly dusted with snow and ice. I like the how the snow appears to have turned into crystals in the branch crevices.

Is your garden or some of it’s plants covered in snow? We had a Green Christmas here, but we just got some snow, so while I can’t complain that we’re buried in snow I can say that are garden looks quite a bit different than it did a few days ago.

The Sedum and other flowers that I grow in my garden are beginning to fade away as Autumn brings cooler weather, but a few weeks ago, many of my garden plants were still in bloom.

The photo above is a picture of the Sedum that I grow in my front yard. I love it’s multi-coloured tiny pink flowers with their white highlights.

As I said the sedum are fading away now, but I usually leave them in the garden through winter as they look nice dried – even when they are partially covered in snow.

This is a photo of a white Cosmo flower growing in front of my house in my planted boulevard.

The cosmos came up on their own this year. Growing almost like wild flowers in the empty spaces in the garden bed. They looked lovely amid the tall sunflowers, peonies, daylilies and Siberian Irises.

Looking at this photo you could almost imagine that it’s in a field of wild flowers couldn’t you, rather than in a planted urban garden?

I think Clematis flowers are lovely, but when the flower fades away and a seed head develops? On some types of clematis, the seed head is as pretty or even more beautiful than the flower it replaced!

Now the Daniel Deronda Clematis is lovely. It has deep purple, thick, velvet petals. It’s outstanding to view …. but then this lovely, almost feathery seed head develops and it’s almost equal in beauty.

Alium are such strange flowers … they are part of the onion family, but of course the ones we grow in our garden are ornamental and I’m sure are inedible.

These Alium tend to bloom at the end of June for me, but this year we’ve had a cooler than normal summer so they didn’t start to bloom until maybe the second week of July! Either way, we enjoyed seeing them … too bad they only bloom once.

This lovely rose is an English Rose. It’s called Graham Thomas and as you can see it has beautiful flowers … In fact, it blooms repeatedly throughout the growing season, so I can almost always enjoy the sight of it’s lovely flowers from mid-June through to late November or even early December.

Do you grow Roses?