We had our festival, Welcome To Winter, today. A warm, sunny day, on the verge of Halloween. Halloween is short for All Hallows Eve, which is the day before All Saints Day. Traditions associated with Halloween go back to pagan times, and were taken up by Christianity. It was said the recently dead couldn’t go to heaven until All Saints …

It’s a bright sunny morning. Warm in the sun but a little chilly in the shade. The ground is scattered with helicopters from the sycamore, its leaves beginning to yellow. Around the garden are half a dozen artists, painting or using pastels, to portray aspects of our garden. I admire their hardiness as well as their images. The marigolds are …

These are the chilly days as the nights grow longer and autumn deepens. Day temperatures are in the mid-teens, and at night below 10 degrees. I see no animal life in the pond except snails. They are cold-blooded, and dormant. This is the advantage of cold-blooded creatures, by dropping into dormancy they need little food. They will maintain their barely-alive …

It is Autumn, or nearly so. Meteorological autumn began on 1 September, so we are well into that. But astronomical autumn starts in a few days’ time. The Greenwich Observatory give the date as Friday 23 September. That day will have equal day and night, 12 hours apiece. After the equinox, the nights win out until the Winter Solstice on …

On Friday, we tidied up the hundreds of pots filling the back stage in order to make it usable for functions other than storage. This threw up the problem of what to do with the pots. We have far too many. Pots come to us in various ways. We buy plants in pots, plant them out and we have a …

Forest Gate had 12 hours of rain yesterday, from fierce downpour to drizzle, almost filling the metre cube that collects water from our pergola. It has the largest roof area and we take advantage of that in water collection. Other barrels filled but to a lesser extent, as they are supplied by smaller roofs. The drought is not yet over, …

It feels like autumn in the garden. There’s lots of leaf fall and leaves on the sycamore and birch are yellowing. This is the effect of heat and drought. The trees are distressed. Getting rid of leaves helps alleviate water shortage, but it is at a cost as the early shutdown of photosynthesis means less stored sugar going into next …

The weather has been hot and dry for many weeks. July was the driest month on record in the UK, and August continues that way. The garden is suffering. Last Friday, I spent much of my time pulling up dead plants and throwing them on the compost heap. As the drought has gone on and on, I have been surprised …

It’s been a busy period in the garden this month. There was Forest Gate Festival at the beginning of the month, which split us in two. We were one of the 120 stalls on Osborne Road, and also kept the garden open on the same day. Last week, we had our Summer Celebration with musician Miri and her feminist blues …

The pond is low, a foot lower than it was in spring. The hot, dry weather is drying it out rapidly. The underwater plants, hornwort and elodea, are crowding the pond, their fronds and runners weaving all through it, growing in the hot weather but with less room for expansion in the falling water level. In our book, Summertime, published …