The day of the Lord Mayor's Show in London is the traditional date for planting tulips. It is always best to put them in the ground later than other spring bulbs - they can even be planted in December if needs be. (Monty Don has admitted to planting them as late as January.) This year, the Lord Mayor's Show will be held on 12th November, so if you are going by the book, this weekend is the perfect time. As with daffodils, a mix of varieties, shapes and colours will give stunning bunches. The tulips above were grown from bulbs from Gee Tee which has a huge number of varieties at good prices.

Now that the 'official' time to plant daffodil and narcissus bulbs has passed, sacks of a single variety are extremely good value in garden centres. They are a very worthwhile investment if you have the time and space to plant them, as most daffodils return year after year, for example the ultra-reliable N.'Ice Follies'. Alternatively, a mix of varieties will give a lovely bowl of daffodils - 'like a poem' as Anne at her first 'At Home' describes them. If you plant both early- and late-flowering varieties it's possible to have many weeks of cheerful flowers next spring. Peter Nyssen always has a good range.

This week on the Post, the late planting of spring bulbs. Gardening guides and articles usually advise getting most spring bulbs into the ground in September, and tulips in November. But it has been such a mild autumn here that now is actually a very good time to buy or order some bags of bulbs, many of which are on offer or at reduced prices. The smaller species crocuses will naturalise in grass while larger Dutch crocuses, such as 'Pickwick' above, are lovely in pots. Crocus bulbs can still be bought from various suppliers, including Farmer Gracy.

We end the week as we started, with Virginia Woolf. Her diary entries for November evoke the pleasures of dusk, and the contrast between bright, warm rooms and the 'dying light' outside. This was the time for that immovable Bloomsbury Group late afternoon ritual: tea, perhaps with toast, muffins or or crumpets. The painting above, a Persephone favourite, captures this moment in the day: it is Reading by Lamplight (Twilight: Interior) (1909, in Lotherton Hall) by George Clausen (1852-1944). Virginia Woolf's diaries are incredibly readable and endlessly fascinating; we publish A Writer's Diary but sadly the five volumes published by Penguin are out of print (secondhand copies can be found on abebooks).

'Autumn Leaves' (1856) by John Everett Millais (1829-96) is one of the highlights of the Manchester Art Gallery collection. It is a timeless but enigmatic ode to autumn, the season of leaf-clearing, bonfires, and smoke. John Ruskin described it as “by much the most poetical work the artist has yet conceived; and also, as fas as I know, the first instance of a perfectly painted twilight.”

Artists have also been inspired by the dank, gloomy, melancholy aspect of dusk. This is A Yorkshire Home (1878, Mercer Art Gallery) by the master of the genre, John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93). The write-up here describes it thus: "The autumnal setting is a symphony in gold: the dark, seemingly empty house and surrounding land are bathed in crepuscular light...The textures of damp leaves, moss-covered stone and glassy still waters are overlaid with a lace-like effect of skeletal branches and the last leaves of autumn, and dusk has descended over another season". It recalls scenes in novels by the Brontë sisters, and indeed late afternoon in late autumn is possibly the best time to visit Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Commuters and users of buses, tubes, and trains at dusk move in a different world of bright London Underground roundels, warmly lit buses, and stations like beacons along darkening railways lines. Letchworth Station, Scene at Dusk (undated, in the North Hertfordshire Museum) by Francis King (1905-2001) is typical of small provincial stations at this time of year. It is on the line between King's Cross and Cambridge, and is still exactly as shown above.