Fall In My Garden and Autumnal Quotes

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”  ~L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

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.

The Vital Storytellers--Beth Trissel

“I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.” Katherine Dunn

So do I, and I’ve given much thought to the inestimable value of the storytellers, both in the family and those with a far broader reach. In each generation, the storytellers remind us who we are, where we’re going, and most importantly to me, where we came from. The keepers of the story pass on that knowledge, those family accounts, the history. Someone must keep the stories alive, lest we forget. I am blessed to come from a family with a rich wealth of genealogy and lines traced back as far as Geoffrey Chaucer, and farther. I know who I am and where I came from and hold it as a sacred trust to pass that on. In this crazy world, it’s more important than ever to remember. So I tell my children, my grandchildren, my nieces…and reach out to the world through my writing. I am one of the storytellers.

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
Peter Handke

“The start is what stops most people.” Inspiring Quotes and Images

I have spread my dreams beneath your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. W.B. Yeats

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
Harriet Tubman

Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
Pamela Vaull Starr

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
Patrick Henry

Hope is the dream of the waking man. ~French Proverb

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores. ~William Shakespeare

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly. ~Lanston Hughes

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Henry David Thoreau

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” - E. E. Cummings

“Great minds have great purposes, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.”
- Washington Irving

“The start is what stops most people.” - Don Shula

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” - Bill Cosby

“To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” - Elbert Hubbard

“It is during our failures that we discover our true desire for success.” ~ Kevin Ngo

“Don’t wait for something big to occur. Start where you are, with what you have, and that will always lead you into something greater.” - Mary Manin Morrissey

*Royalty free images

Ah me! Love cannot be cured by herbs. ~ Ovid

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.  ~Henry David Thoreau

We loved with a love that was more than love.  ~Edgar Allan Poe

Do I love you because you’re beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense.  ~Mark Overby

Who, being loved, is poor? ~Oscar Wilde

Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river.  ~Malagasy Proverb

Love – a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker. ~Author Unknown

Love one another and you will be happy.  It’s as simple and as difficult as that.  ~Michael Leunig

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. ~George Moore

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.  ~Jean Anouilh

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.  ~Rose Franken

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.  ~Swedish Proverb

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.  ~John Bulwer

‘Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.  ~Lord Byron

Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a winding path walked arm in arm.  ~Robert Brault

Love is the poetry of the senses.  ~Honoré de Balzac

Love is a game that two can play and both win.  ~Eva Gabor

Without love, the rich and poor live in the same house.  ~Author Unknown

We don’t believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.  ~Marie Ebner Von Eschenbach, Aphorism

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.  ~François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.  ~Elinor Glyn

In All Things of Nature There Is Something of the Marvelous.~Aristotle

Some lovely thoughts and images on this fine spring day~

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”  ~Henry David Thoreau

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kind.” William Shakespeare

“I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees.  The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.

It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day.  It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.  Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me – I am happy.”  

~Hamlin Garland, McClure’s, February 1899

“You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.”

~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church, I keep it staying at Home -With a bobolink for a Chorister, And an Orchard, for a Dome.” 

~Emily Dickinson

“Joy all creatures drink At nature’s bosoms…”  ~Friedrich von Schiller, “Ode to Joy,” 1785

“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.”  ~Jane Austen

“I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.  Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”  ~Wendell Berry

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.”
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.  This is not done by jostling in the street.”  ~William Blake

“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”  ~Helen Keller

“To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, – to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.”
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV

“Fieldes have eies and woods have eares.”  ~John Heywood, 1565

“You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness – perhaps ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of these things…”  

~Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, “Birds – And a Caution”  (Thanks, Corinne)

“Butterflies are self propelled flowers.”  ~R.H. Heinlein

“If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.”  ~Author Unknown

*Images of the green-gold trees, the baby goose and kitten, the Shenandoah Valley in early spring and the nesting duck are by my mom, Pat Churchman.  The black swallowtail butterfly is by my daughter Elise.  Dark Hollow Falls in the Blue Ridge Mountains is a royalty free pic.

***For gardeners, nature lovers, anyone who thinks fondly of country life, or is just plain human…you might enjoy my nonfiction book out in kindle now, in nookbook by April, and soon out in print with beautiful pics, a 2012 EPIC eBOOK FINALIST, Shenandoah Watercolors.

For The Love Of A Pond

Henry Thoreau said of Walden Pond,”A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

Thoreau lived in a small cabin at Walden Pond for two years where he did some of his best writing and learned the essentials of life.

From http://thoreau.eserver.org/answer.html

“Henry wanted to write, and needed a quieter place than the Thoreau household to do this. And he did write both A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and an early draft of Walden in his two years at the pond. But in Walden’s ”Where I Lived, & What I Lived for,” he describes an additional motive. '

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

In conclusion, Thoreau said, “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

*Image of Walden Pond and a replica of Thoreau’s cabin

Thoreau isn’t the only one who loved a pond.  I’m deeply fond of ours. Although Walden Pond is rather larger than our farm pond, more of a lake really, and heavily wooded.  Grassy meadows and corn fields surround our pond, but wooded hills rise above the fields, and beyond these, on a clear day, you can see the Alleghenies.

I could not write all that I have without this marvelous  ever-changing scene around me.   And the pond plays host to many birds and waterfowl.  Overhead, swifts, swallows, and purple martins skim and dive in pursuit of the insects we are very glad for them to devour.  The swifts gathered in mass and departed early in the fall two years ago when we had a bad winter.  Which I predicted from this event.

But back to the water, most interesting to me is that you never know what waterfowl might be swimming on it.  Migrating ducks of all sorts have stopped by, and I do love ducks.  The most common, of course, are the mallards.  Wood ducks nest in the tangle of trees growing along the edge of the meadow in a dry creek bed that runs with water when the heavy rains come.  Each spring finds the wood duck mammas on the pond with their babies darting over the water like little bumblebees.

Our barn yard geese make daily treks down to the water.  And flocks of Canadian geese are not uncommon.  The great blue heron can be seen in the early morning mist fishing along the banks.  Sandy brown killdeer dart around the edges of the pond on their long legs, sounding that wild funny cry peculiar to them.   On one snowy day a flock of swans took respite from their journey.   Snow geese wintered with us one year.  Our most unusual visitor was a pink flamingo, though his rosy color had faded from lack of the shell fish that generally make up a flamingo’s diet and gives them that brilliant hue.  I suppose if you fed them lots of carrots they’d turn orange.

An excerpt from my nonfiction book, Shenandoah Watercolors:

Dozens of swallows skim over the pond as the sun sinks below the Alleghenies. If I were standing on a distant ridge, would it sink behind me, or the ridge beyond that one?

The water is calm now but was awash with waves during the storm that hit a short time ago. The grassy hill and maple tree are reflected on the surface, silvery and streaked with rose from the western sky. All is peaceful as a soft twilight settles over the valley. Utterly idyllic, until I pause to consider what all of those swallows are after. There must be clouds of mosquitoes.

Here’s another thought, where do all the birds spend the night? Are the woods up on the hill lined with birds perched wing to wing jostling for space on the branches? I’ll bet they make room for the big red-tailed hawk. He gets the whole tree––as many as he wants. It’s good to be king.~

*Images of our pond by my mom and daughter Elise