A little autumn stroll

I went out for a walk after lunch.

It amazes me sometimes how different twenty minutes in the Gardens can make me feel. Colour and light and fresh, damp, scented air... Autumn crocuses lying prostrated by the rain, their lilac and cerise clashing with each other and with the grass. The first fall colours appearing on maples and acacias. Nerines poking up their Schiaparelli-pink spikes everywhere. In the Princess of Wales Conservatory, the graceful crowns of tropical waterlilies, cerise, violet, cream and gold, are still floating in the black water among dark lily pads. Huge, fantastical bromeliads, alocasias and anthuriums spring up or hang down, everywhere you look. The lithops are flowering, the giant Agave abrupta is still going through the roof and a Titan arum is getting ready to do its thing...

It's cool and misty, a classic autumn day, but in that balmy warmth of the glasshouse I can pretend I am in another place, another time... another world, maybe.