The Colours of Autumn

The Colours of Autumn

Sunny and Dry In Lemnos

Usually this is the best time of the year, alongside spring. The weather is still warm and sunny, thought no longer burning hot. The days are often still and dry and some are still enjoying the sea and swimming everyday.

Because the nights are cooler you can be lulled into thinking that you don’t need to water the garden, but the hills and the garden still dry, so pots and new plants need to be watched carefully or this is the time of the year you could loose them.

You’ll find lovely colours in the garden to pick for the house. And also it is the time to pick dried seed heads for winter decoration. The predominate colours are red and yellow, with the Virginia creepers turning red, and yellow daisies and chrysanthemums coming into flower.

In the well shed I have hanging onions, garlic (enough to feed an army), basil and oregano. I must soon crumble these last two and put in bottles to use next year.

 

Autumn

John Clare

The thistledown’s flying, though the winds are all still,

On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,

The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot:

Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.

 

The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,

The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.

The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,

And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

 

Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,

And the rivers we’re eyeing burn to gold as they run;

Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;

Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

 

Colouring the Months of Autumn

Gatherings from the garden brighten the kitchen and the leaves of autumn turn bright red against the stone walls.



Along the paths you find a few ‘last roses of summer’ and those very early promises of spring as bulbs send up their first shoots.

 

Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;

Praise him.