The Last Day of Fall

It's going to be a while before I have spectacular gardens to show you.  I'm still deep in the process of cleaning up and fixing up the new house.  But something happened recently that took me completely by surprise:

Fall color!  No, no, see, I didn't have that at my old house.  Sure, the Mulberry turned a little yellow before it shook off all its leaves at once like the Whomping Willow at Hogwart's, but the Chaste Tree and Mexican Orchid just kind of died and defoliated.  The little live oak out front was evergreen - in fact, 99% of the trees in that neighborhood are evergreen oaks, so, no - no fall color for me for the past twelve years.  In fact, Austin in general hardly has any, at least, not on the scale that you see pretty much everywhere else in the country.  The whole city just seems to blacken and die in November, except for the oaks.  How boring.

This neighborhood, however, is brimming with color. I know what I'm doing, more or less, and I don't recognize half the trees I see around me most of the time, living here.  (Which is neat!)  This red-orange fellow above is some sort of plum tree growing on the property line between my house and my neighbor's.  And the Lace Bark Elm in my front yard carpets the entire lot with this: 

Which, yeah, it's messy, but it's beautiful.  Plus, look at this trunk:

Is that not amazing? It feels really weird.

Here's the whole Elm - still somewhat green, and with green live oaks behind it.  (You can see, a little, how big my yard is in this picture.  You're looking at less than half of it).

But enough about trees...wanna see my front garden?

Impressive, no?  Okay, so it's been fallow for several years. The soil is good - it's had leaf mould from the elm every year, so it's richly composted.  I had grand plans of tilling up the whole thing and mulching the heck out of it, then loading it with plants before the cold set in (see the bag on the porch?), but then...the cold set in about a month early.  The day I took these pictures it was a gorgeous, sunny, 65º day; but then it dropped to 25º  that night and hasn't risen out of the mid-thirties since.  Oh, well.  There's still plenty of time to get the beds in shape before Spring.

 

This, meanwhile, is my actual "garden".  Or rather, pieces of it:  irises, lilies, chives, and Australian indigo salvaged from my old house and quickly heeled into a box planter to await a time when I could put them into the front bed.  Looks like they'll be there a bit longer - at least until I can get another sunny weekend with a temperature that at least starts with a four.

Meanwhile: