Finally, the winter is here. A cleansing frost that rose from the hollows and enveloped the garden in a unifying stillness. Colour held at bay where the freeze touched down, a red sky thrown from a late sunrise and then shadows elongating and revealing the humps, the bumps and the winter tussocks on the Tump. 

It is a relief that the tender salvias and their persistence into December is at last curtailed. The dahlias are finally blackened and the place that the nasturtiums made for themselves so swiftly made absent. The inevitable snap is later than ever this year, and things had begun to feel uncomfortably out of kilter, but the sudden shift feels right and the letting go cathartic. Time for the garden to rest.