Saturday Sept. 29th, was a splendid day to be outdoors and work among the flowers and vegetables in my garden(s). So inviting, in fact, that I overdid it and hurt my back, but back to the beauty of my autumn garden. Daughter Elise took some wonderful photos I’m pleased to share with you, though nothing truly captures the garden like being there. Still, we try, and both of us love this time of year.
The first image featured is of the old red barn in the background with perennial New York Asters, also called Michaelmas Daisies, and Tithonia (Mexican Sunflower) in the front. These flowers attract an amazing variety of butterflies, bees, and all sorts of pollinating insects. The air is murmurous with the hum on a sunny afternoon and iridescent wings sail from flower to flower. I also grow zinnias, phlox, and other butterfly friendly plants, and don’t use any harmful sprays, so have a paradise for them.
Fairies also delight in my garden, so my seven-year old niece. Cailin, tells me. She said her favorite fairy, Florist, often lives among my plants–though she still visits Cailin–and there’s a whole fairy school in my garden. Good to know. I’m honored, and feel certain the tiny fairies are clever enough to evade the Praying Mantisbusy catching a last snack before frost (usually mid-October) carries them away. Their egg cases are safely tucked among the leaves in readiness to hatch out next spring, then baby mantis hop all over the place. Finding an interesting new bug or sighting a lovely butterfly is all part of the joy of the garden. Several of my grandbabies and two young nieces reveled with me in the glory of the day.
“In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil. And at no season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb colour effects as from August to November.” ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
***We love our pumpkins. This a Cinderella pumpkin–our favorite.
I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.” ~ Remy de Gourmont
‘Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.’ ~Elizabeth Bowen
***Zinnias and Asters
Gardens are a form of autobiography. ~Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993
‘There is no season in all the year so beautiful, so radiant with glory, as the early autumn. There is no time when the human soul drinks in so fully the glory and beauty of nature. All objects of beauty are more beautiful while passing away from us. The closing up of a beautiful life—the fading of the holy stars in the dim light of morning—the ending of a quiet summer day and the passing away of the bright summer glory, are all more sweet and lovely as they are lost to us. The death-glow always beautifies anything that wears the trace of beauty ere it goes back to nothingness. We do not understand the secret of this principle, yet we know that it is some law of the infinite mind.’ ~Northern Advocate
***My youngest grandson, Owen, with some of our pumpkins.
“Autumn mornings: sunshine and crisp air, birds and calmness, year’s end and day’s beginnings.” ~Terri Guillemets
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” ~Henry David Thoreau
“Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple…” ~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
***Pumpkin blossom with a pollen covered honey bee
“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.” ~ Lauren DeStefano, Wither
“She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened.” ~Sarah Addison Allen, Garden Spells
“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn–that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness–that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”
~ Jane Austen, Persuasion
“I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.” ~ Lee Maynard
“Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity.” ~Lindley Karstens, noproblemgarden.com
***More of our much-loved Cinderella Pumpkins, like orange jewels. Surely, we have the most sincere pumpkin patch around.
Ah! Glorious, beautiful Autumn. This is my favorite, most colorful (colors I like best) season, and here on the Coast, it's the shortest. I spend more time outside soaking up this majestic time of year. Thank you for the beautiful eye candy :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, and yes, glorious indeed.
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