early morning garden (and apples)

My parents' garden was looking exceptional this morning, as I wandered round it before heading off the Heathrow - late blooming roses, and campions, and fuschias, and then plenty of apples on the trees.  These are not the same trees as those which inhabited the old orchard on part of which our house was built - they have long fallen victim to honey fungus.  But they are the same old traditional varieties; the colors are the same yellows and golds and dappled reds, and so they take me back to all those autumn days picking apples with a pole holding a home-made wire-rimmed receptacle on its end; looking for windfalls that weren't too bruised; endless dishes of baked and stewed apples, and rows of unbruised apples wintering, neatly laid out on brown paper, never touching, in our loft, so that the whole upper landing would smell of apples for months.