It is terribly fashionable to decry the decoration of our homes with cobwebs, bats, spiders, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts for Hallowe’en. Today’s camp creep-fest is certainly a long way from the turnip carved out slowly with a teaspoon of my Northern childhood. That altogether more austere way of marking All Hallow’s Eve was distinguished only by the smell of slowly rotting brassica root mingled with cheap candle wax, which lingered for days. If you were particularly exuberant, you might have poked marbles into the jack-o-lantern’s eyes, but that was quite enough of that, thank you.

Onwards to Bonfire Night and parkin.

However, this can be a gloomy time of year, so there is much to be said for bringing some of the late glories of the garden inside to enjoy their colours and te

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