I just love these skeletal Malva seed heads – this is the native one (I think) that seems to pop up all over my garden. Unless they turn up in a really daft place, they always get to stay where they are because there is something so utterly joyous about their spring to autumn flowering profile.

Everything about this plant is gorgeous, from its crinkly, furry leaves to its pink pollen and the way it is a bee/hoverfly magnet and then, just when you think it has shot its final bolt, you get these wonderful skeletons appearing as the seed heads dry out.

This one has been pulled out from the debris from the sugar snap pea netting that was still in place until yesterday. The plant was about six feet tall and had been flowering happily among the peas all summer. When I finally untangled the dead plants from the pea netting, I came across this pod. I couldn’t resist its skeletal charm and carefully extracted it to get a photo. I saved it for today because I’d already got a shot that I was really happy with for yesterday.

After I saw this and collected it, I cleared three of my vegetable beds – the ones that had been home to potatoes, spinach, sugar snaps, mange touts, courgettes, climbing beans and mint……tons and tons of the stuff. I just don’t have the heart to oik out the mint that winds its way around everything I plant. Once a year, after the season ends, I dig over the ground, pull out as much mint root as I can see and then let it go its own merry way for another year. Why not? Fresh mint is the ultimate summer flavour and another bee magnet as it flowers and wafts around.

Mostly I photograph these things in situ but for some reason I decided to bring this into the house and have a play with artificial light. Looking at what I’ve done, I realise I’m craving sunshine – the tungsten light and the blue background are what I should have experienced yesterday while digging but alas, it was not to be – a grey, damp afternoon had turned up after the sunshine in the morning.

Anyway, today has been grey and cold too, except for a strange half-hour interlude when I was driving back from a client through Slough of all places. For some strange, inexplicable reason the sun shot out for a short while then dived back behind its blanket of cloud. So, after a weekend of gloomy stuff, then more today, I needed some fake sun.

Last year we were at WHL watching Spurs beat Pompey - how history repeats itself!