ANOTHER WRITER'S VOICE
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Twenty years ago my dear friend Elin Harris gave me a book titled THE WRITER IN THE GARDEN. I frequently read these essays about gardening by nearly 70 writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Henry Thoreau and Edith Wharton, and enjoy them all. But I have one perennial favorite. Every September I re-read Lauren Springer’s “The Arrival of Fall.”
Below is an excerpt from her description of my favorite season.
THE ARRIVAL OF FALL
Fresh vibrant June passes to a languid slow July. Then comes a turning point, when summer suddenly feels utterly tiresome. Some years, late summer weather is kind and merciful, indulging the gardener in a quick turn to cool nights and days filled with a mellow amber sunlight that actually feels good on the face, totally unlike the prickling and piercing rays of high summer. Other years the wait is interminable, summer’s heat oozing on well into months traditionally autumnal.
Autumn has become my favorite time of the year. It took a while for negative associations with the beginning of the school year to wane, for the golden sunlight and foliage to stop conjuring up the intestinal butterflies that went along with similarly toned school buses lurching down the street. While some find spring with all its optimistic beginnings the finest season in the garden, I much prefer the unfrenzied pace of fall. In the spring, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the sudden demands of the garden. A long winter has a way of creating such yearnings and high expectations that I could almost say I feel a bit pressured by the new season, not to mention out of shape after a lazy winter spent fattening up by the fire.
By autumn, I’m synchronized with the garden, lean and mean, realistic about my expectations. The garden requires much less of me — weeds are well under control and careful deadheading has long been abandoned. As a friend once described so well, the autumn garden is a machete garden. Anyone still trying to control or tame it in September is either hopelessly deluded or has a strange need to use large cutting tools from the jungle.
The season transforms the garden and the gardener. While a similar scene in June might send one scrambling for stakes and twine, come September it is a wonderful sense of release to watch plants collapse slowly on each other, soft and heavy with the weight of a full season’s growth. Leaves begin to yellow and brown. Flowers become seeds. Everything is soft, large, ripe. As I walk among the plants, they reflect my mood — placid and self-satisfied.
Just as fall is a time for letting go, for riding with the slow, melancholy yet beautiful decline toward the inevitability of winter, it is also a time for loosening up rigid color rules. What may jar in the May and June gardens is a welcome sight in October. Colors have richened and deepened with the cooler temperatures and golden light. The sunlight of autumn softens the boundaries that in spring and summer define orange, red, magenta and purple. The gardener should soften as well.
Just as a person living out his or her last years should be indulged some special extravagances and not judged harshly for them, so should an autumnal garden be allowed a grand finale of wild color fireworks without too many “tasteful” restraints. Nature combines cobalt skies, red and yellow leaves and purple asters. The gardener does well to take inspiration from these stunning scenes.
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From “The Writer in the Garden” edited by Jane Carmey, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1999
