Last flames

The berberis in my garden is worth looking at, now, today. Tomorrow it may well have lost more leaves - wind and rain are forecast - and when all the other bushes were blazing with autumnal colours it was still green and berry-less because we almost always forget how vigorously annoying it will become and find ourselves hacking big bits off it at the start of summer. It never really reaches its full potential, though I seem to recall an improvement the year we had a dry day in November and razed it more or less to the ground.

So for most of the year it's a green spiky mass that gets in the way and tugs at you as you pass - and now it's glorious and we hardly get to see it before it vanishes. Here it is, then, in all its glory.

Immortalised.