Autumn

[Andrew in Germany]

Autumn… I falter with it every year. It comes like a reckoning, patient and merciless. The light thins, the air sharpens, and I’m left to make my small, inevitable choices — which lives to spare, which to crowd into the dim shrinking greenhouse, which to abandon to the frost. Which are light enough to come indoors? Hope grows thin, and the rum no longer helps.

I can’t drink anymore.

Spring pretends to be a beginning, but it’s really where the ending starts. Each year I fall for it — that soft green deceit. I propagate too many plants, too many promises, knowing I’ll never save them all when winter comes, but oh, who cares. Summer makes me believe for a while, with its wild abundance and sweet lies of permanence. But it never lasts. The days darken, the edges fray, and soon enough, autumn is waiting again — patient as regret.
...and then death.

Sorry, got carried away there.

I've got lots to toss, give away or even better, to sell or barter. Then I realize I could just toss a load to the compost heap and start all over again in the spring...



.

[MartinNicklin]

Andrew, you’ve been reading too much Hesse and Eichendorff!

[flounder]

Autumn… I falter with it every year. It comes like a reckoning, patient and merciless. The light thins, the air sharpens, and I’m left to make my small, inevitable choices — which lives to spare, which to crowd into the dim shrinking greenhouse, which to abandon to the frost. Which are light enough to come indoors? Hope grows thin, and the rum no longer helps.

I can’t drink anymore.

Spring pretends to be a beginning, but it’s really where the ending starts. Each year I fall for it — that soft green deceit. I propagate too many plants, too many promises, knowing I’ll never save them all when winter comes, but oh, who cares. Summer makes me believe for a while, with its wild abundance and sweet lies of permanence. But it never lasts. The days darken, the edges fray, and soon enough, autumn is waiting again — patient as regret.
...and then death.

Sorry, got carried away there.

I've got lots to toss, give away or even better, to sell or barter. Then I realize I could just toss a load to the compost heap and start all over again in the spring...



.

I'll give this litarary insight a go.

Crap time of year, lots of stuff will die soon.

Nailed it!

[charlie]

:)

[Chad]

But spring is stirring.




Narcissus 'Rijnveld's Early Sensation' looks like I will have it in bloom well before Christmas this year.

Chad

[MartinNicklin]

That’s optimistic Chad to talk of spring when autumn isn’t over!

It’s been mild … so far. My Dahlia campanulatas are the closest they have ever been to flowering outside:



Six of the eight imperialis trunks were felled by the recent winds but the remaining two have buds almost at house roof height:



And my Tetrapanax stand is a mass of buds. It often is and ALWAYS succumbs to the first frosts. It would look lovely with a mass of frothy flower but I’m guessing this doesn’t happen often in the UK as there are precious few images of this plant on the net in spectacular bloom:



But of course I’ve just read that from next week the temperatures plummet and all my hopes for autumnal splendour from these late bloomers will yet again be dashed.

[Chad]

In a good year we don't get winter here Martin, the drawback is that in many years we don't get a summer either!

Chad

[MartinNicklin]

:lol: