quote

"The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, and the year

On the earth her death bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, is lying."

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

quote

"oh wild West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow and black, and pale, and hectic red"

- Percy Bysshe shelley

quote

"The leaves which in the autumn of the year
Fall auburn-tinted, leaving reft and bare
Their parent trees, in many a sheltered lair
Where winter waits and watches,
cold, austere."
- Old Year Leaves by Mackenzie Bell

quote

"Nature now spreads around, in dreary hue,

A pall to cover all that summer knew;

Yet in the poet's solitary way,

Some pleasing objects for his praise delay"

- John clare

quote

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

These leaves that redden to the fall,

And in my heart, if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair."

Alfred Lord Tennyson

quote

"Thus harvest ends its busy reign,

And leaves the fields their peace again,

Where Autumn's shadows idly muse

And tinge the trees in many hues."

- John clare

quote

"Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods,

And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt"

- William Allingham

quote

"Yon hanging woods, that touched by Autumn seem

As they were blossoming hues of fire and gold;

The flower-like woods, most lovely in decay..."

- Samuel Taylor coleridge

quote

"The calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves

Budding - fruit ripening in stillness - Autumn suns

Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves."

- John Keats

"An exercise in faith, it has been called, this consumptive pastime of ours, to believe that a bed, once more colorful with handwritten plastic than plants, would become a billowing border the following spring."
- Daniel Hinkley and Robert Jones

"In the sheltered heart of the clumps last year's foliage still clings to the lower branches, tatters of orange that mutter with the passage of the wind, the talk of old women warning the green generation of what they, too, must come to when the sap runs back."
- Jacquetta Hawkes

Whoooo. The remaining leaves all fell at once on one rainy windy day. The world looks as old as me, spooky for Halloween, not like last year's glorious last hurrah.
This evening I found a sweet little mouse in my kitchen; her name was Minnie.



And a beautiful purple fairy (with green woolies underneath her gossamer costume) was discovered in my living room, stealing candy, as fairies will do.

A walk in the woods

Our favorite cider mill was so crowded with tourists out for their once yearly trek to buy pumpkins and jump in the bounce house that Pa just drove right past, even though K does dearly love bounce houses.
I know, the business world is tough, and this is what brings in the spenders... sigh.
We'll be back when the bounce house is gone.

We went for a walk instead.


At the State Park, we hiked in the woods (two miles is a lot for little ones! SOME of us got carried part way) we collected pretty leaves, and we threw rocks in the lake.


We saw native Witch Hazel blooming, and found Sassafras 'mittens' shaped like Michigan.


After a snack in the pavilion, we played on the old swingset until thoroughly tuckered out.

October's flaming leaves 'lighting the way to winter', indeed.

The shame of it is, we saw a total of two other couples walking their dogs, during the whole afternoon. A few miles away, the plastic bounce house was jumpin' and shakin'. Do I worry about America? Yes.

"October's poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter."
- Nova Bair

"For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad."
- Edwin Way Teale

Getting near that time of year

The angle of the sun lower, dawn later, sunset sooner, the nights cold, the geese practicing their maneuvers, the colors changing, the school buses on the roads, the children wearing book bags, me in the garden picking the last tomatoes.



The medicinal herbal plants in the photo include goldenrod - Solidago canadensis, boneset - Eupatorium perfoliatum, great blue lobelia - Lobelia siphilitica, and that yellow sunflower which is one of the tallest perennials that grows here, the cup plant - Silphium perfoliatum.
Trees in the meadow-turned-woods are tinting yellow-y now. There used to be a cow pasture there, then a corn field there, and now a scrub woods is beginning. I used to look across that field all the way to the far hedgerow, and in the winter I could see rabbits popping their heads up out of their barrows. Last year three deer leaped out of the thicket of trees while I was putting the garden to bed. Nothing stays the same.

Spring and Fall, to a Young Child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Getting in the spirit

I had a great day Saturday at Crossroads Village, working with the ladies of the Genesee County Herb Society. While one team worked in the Eldridge House, decorating that mid-1880's family home for the Christmas season with historically appropriate, natural and mostly herbal decorations; ourdoors we gardeners cleaned and put to bed the culinary herb garden, the fragrance and cutting garden, and the doctor's medicinal garden at the Doctor's office next door.
There's Norma, our president.
The kitchen smells like cinnamon and herbs when you walk in from the cold.


(Hi Milli, Sharon and Joanne!)
Here's the doctor's office, from the backyard:

And the doctor's garden (there's Diane):

I must say, Michigan can have some glorious, memorable autumn days.

(A note to the ladies of the Genesee County Herb Society: if you'd like to see more photos of our doings, double click on the orange Flickr badge on the right side of the screen... for the 'friends only' viewing permission to see more GCHS photos, write to me and I'll pop an invite in the e-mail.)

facing the autumn with grace

The ginkgos are yellow, the serviceberries are orange, the maples are a little dry and crispy leaves are flying everywhere. The unusually nice weather has given me time to do a good job of gathering and 'putting by' my garden's harvest. Not that there isn't a lot more to be done, in putting the yard to bed. You'd think I had forty acres (and a mule) by the way I talk, but it is only a small suburban lot.

I'd love to have some 'real land' (she said in her lumberjack voice) to work with, but I have borrowed views to enjoy, and I know my familiar soil, and it is all already so ever much to do, and the older I get the more I understand that someday it will all have to come to an end. Toward this, ahem, end, I'm severely limiting my plant collecting impulse and consciously not replacing things that I lose. The lost years of the fragrant dianthus collection, the colorful irises, the tropicals and the spring bulbs, the daylilies, the old garden roses, the varieties of daisies and veronicas and achilleas and campanulas and agastaches (I used to get the little catalogue from J.L.Hudson, Seedman, if that tells you anything) and especially the seed starting mania will have to be beautiful memories to entertain my mind when I can't garden any more.
And the herbs. Don't let me forget the herbs.

And the critters. There is such joy in the strangeness of other species of animals. I've seen animals in books and on film, and in 3-d reality in zoos, but there is something above wonderful about seeing mother nature's other children out in the open, living and surviving on their own. (Yes, Marion, Nature does too exist.)

On that note, I was out in the garden yesterday picking more peppers (almost finished for the year) for cooking and freezing and dehydrating when a literal crashing through the brush behind the shed brought me up from my task and there manifested three young deer, standing right there in a clearing among the scrubby shrubs with their bright eyes and huge ears and lovely velvety noses at attention.
I understand it's bow hunting season, and they move in response to the hunters' disturbing of their domain but I've never actually seen a deer in my yard before.
I have seen tracks and found some damage (blueberry), but the rabbits are the real culprits around here with their shrub girdling winter hunger. What a treat though, to see these three deer up close and personal.
They stood as mesmerized as I was for a few moments and took off leaping right back into the field. In one fortunate moment of grace I had collected a memory for the winter, undeserved, appreciated.