How my garden has changed with the arrival of Autumn

I've been sharing notes from my garden over the summer, and I wanted to write a post about how it's looking now that Autumn is decidedly here. But it turns out that most of what I have to write about is the leaves! 

We have a beautiful tree at the bottom of our garden, I think that it's some kind of ornamental cherry blossom. It's on land which is owned by the parish council, up against our fence. It must have been planted when the houses were built, making it around 25 years old, and over the last few years it has just grown and grown. I managed to arrange for it to be pollarded a couple of years back, but I think that just made it grow more!

It is really lovely, and I enjoy having it to look at from my house. In the spring it is covered with an abundance of blossom, it provides shade during the summer, and in the autumn it looks beautiful covered in golden leaves. But of course all those leaves have to go somewhere, and where they go is all over my garden!

I've always been a bit obsessed about picking up the leaves, even more so this year now that we have a lovely lawn of newly laid turf. I find myself out there two, sometimes three, times a day picking up every single leaf from the lawn. I am a little more laid back with the flower beds though, until they become completely covered I'm letting the leaves lay where they fall.

There is a corner of the garden, right underneath the tree, that I have designated as a small wildlife area, and this is where we have placed the hedgehog house. I go out every evening to top up the food bowl and we are rewarded most nights with a hedgehog snuffling around (we have placed a camera so that we can watch what goes on). If the hedgehog can't manage all the food then a cat or magpie will come along in the morning and eat what's left. So I'm leaving all the leaves in this area so that the hedgehog has somewhere to root around for slugs and bugs.

I bought some cyclamen a month or two ago for some autumn colour. I've planted them around the base of our new pear tree, as it was looking a little bare. They look beautiful, I hope that they will continue to flower for a while yet now that the rest of the flowers are slowly coming to an end. 

I'm glad that it hasn't got too cold yet, as I still have a few things to get done in the garden before winter sets in. I've planted most of my bulbs, but there are still a few to add to empty planters now that I've bought some extra compost. I also have some foxgloves which I planted in pots over the summer, I want to put them out in the borders and hope that they survive the frosts. I also want to do a bit of weeding so that the garden looks tidy for the winter.

We've added a lot of plants to our garden this year and I'm not really sure what to do with everything as the weather gets colder. I'm just hoping that most of them survive the cold temperatures and that everything will start to fill out in the spring - I'm excited to see how the garden changes over the next year!