After a frosty night, most of the summer flowers on the deck have died. A few hardy ones are still green and even flowering, especially the snapdragon, but most look bedraggled and sad.

Today I threw them out, not only to remove the dead brown plants from my view, but also to clear the deck. One autumn I left a flowerpot out for too long in late autumn and it left a pot-shaped patch of rot in the deck boards. You’d think that it would all be equally wet anyway, but apparently not. Or maybe it is all equally wet but the bottom of the pot made for a good, protected growing ground for microorganisms. Now I’m careful to move the pots occasionally in wet weather, and to remove them completely when the season is definitely over.

The thick tangle of roots filling most of the pots is pleasing to the eye, because it means they’ve grown well. Most pots looked like this. But there were a few where I could pull out a plant with no effort, leaving much of the soil still in the pot – their roots had barely grown since I planted them. It didn’t really come as a surprise, because the lack of growth in some of the plants was very obvious above ground as well.