Flowers and a Dying Butternut

The garden is winding down at this time of year, and flowers are fading.  Days are noticeably shorter, and today it's been really cold!  And I almost missed this month's deadline for reporting on my Butternut tree, which I fear is dying.

I almost missed spotting this white Coneflower, and it's now on it's way out, like many of the garden plants.

I think the Heleniums are past their best, but they're still adding some bright colour to the garden.

The sedums are bright and in bloom at this time of year though.  We have both pink and white ones.

We have a couople of sprawling mums, also looking a little faded now.  We thought we'd lost this one, so at least it's survived.

All the Sunflowers were eaten by the critters that do battle with us, but this one popped up from under the Zuchinni this week, our only Sunflower this year.

We've got a big patch of pale mauve Vervain.  But what do you do with plants that get tall and overgrown and fall over in all directions?

The Phlox are almost over, but this purple one is my favourite colour.  It's growing in the shade, so doesn't put out many blossoms, but it's a pretty colour.

And the raspberries that have been struggling in various locations over the nearly 15 years since my wife brought the bare root stock home, have finally got a good crop of berries for the very first time!  We've started enjoying them, and will have quite a bit of picking we can do yet.

Then there are the weeds that I've been neglecting, like this bright thistle that escaped my attention until it was 3 feet tall!

But my Butternut tree is not doing well.  Even though the leaves never turned colour, they've all pretty well fallen off now, and there was no crop of Butternuts this year.  Some years the ground has been littered with them.

It's the comparison to the other trees in the fencerow that makes me think it's dying.  All the leaves are still surprisingly green here, but the Butternut stands out as giving up it's leaves first.