400 bulbs, ten people, two hours

Bulb planting causes quite a specific range of gardening aches and pains. Apart from the prolonged crouching and bending, which are more or less de rigeur for most types of gardening activity, there's the repetitive strain of digging many small holes in hard ground, deep enough to put off greedy squirrels, who treat bulb planting as an easy treasure hunt laid on by kind humans. In a couple of sunny, Sunday afternoon hours, a bunch of us planted what should prove to be a blaze of colour next spring. It's the third year of bulb planting in the burial ground at the end of my road - and each year, the colour spreads. This year, 250 tulip bulbs arrived courtesy of the Eden Project's Big Bulb Plant. But donations of daffs went in too. Roll on 2010. Makes the winter almost worthwhile, knowing these little colour bombs will be gearing up to explode into the late winter grey and wheedle me out of hibernation.

And then there were none.

Colours 3 - October

Not very season-of-mists-and-mellow-fruitfulness. Instead, my garden this month is summed up by these amazingly intense colours from an unnamed pompom-flowered purple aster, an equally purple aconitum (monkshood) and the barbie pink salvia. A bit of subtelty from the caryopteris just going to seed and a viburnum on the verge of flowering, with backing foliage from the olive tree, plus an olive to chime in with a local produce theme.