I have always loved the October light, which is so distinctive that novelist John Gardner, who had poetry in his soul, used it in a book title. On any sunny October Saturday, the light is mellow and golden, illuminating the plants in ways that are absent in summer. While it gilds the landscape, the light also becomes steadily more precious, as the days grow markedly shorter after the Autumn Equinox on September 21. That lessening of daylight triggers the garden chrysanthemums’ bloom cycle, not to mention the coloring of leaves on deciduous trees. I was sure that this year the drought would make the maple in front of my house drop all its leaves before changing color, but now it has suddenly become brilliant. The absence of chlorophyll allows the reds and oranges to dominate those leaves and makes it possible for the light to shine right through them at certain times in the late afternoons. Near the maple is the young Carolina silverbell tree, which dazzles in spring with hundreds of pendulous white “bells”. The “bells” are long gone and now the leaves are a brilliant yellow, complementing the maple’s blazing color. I don’t have time to drop everything and go to northern New York or New England for the fall foliage show, but the spectacle I see from my bedroom window is magnificent enough. It matches the size of my world right now.
I try to keep the fallen leaves, beautiful though they are, out of the beds and borders where plants are still blooming. ‘Sally Holmes’, a single-flowered, hybrid musk rose is putting on a last show. Unlike many other roses, ‘Sally’ groups its white blooms into big, rounded clusters at the ends of the canes. In summer, my bush might have a score of these impressive clusters; now it has only one, but it is more magnificent in its solitary splendor. I would love to clip it for the house, but am loath to impoverish the garden at a time when the amount of ornament is so reduced. In the same bed, the striped rose, ‘Scentimental’, which in June sports lots of red and white striped flowers, has only a few and the white is almost completely eclipsed by the scarlet in each petal.
The light—or its absence—may be speaking to the chrysanthemums, but at this moment the buds are still tightly shut. Prima donnas in their own right, they wait until they are just about the only show in the garden and then unfold their petals. Depending on weather conditions, I may have peach or pink garden mums to include in the Thanksgiving centerpiece. Of course, some years, I have had roses as well. Nature delights in making fools of those of us who try to predict her actions.
Garden mums are a good investment for anyone looking for late season color. They are generally not the pinnacles of manicured perfection that you find in the so-called “hardy mums” stocked by retailers, but the plants return faithfully every year in slowly-enlarging clumps. Some people remember to pinch the stems back at Memorial Day and the Fourth of July to ensure bushier plants and greater numbers of flowers. This is a good habit to develop and relatively easy to remember. Circumstances conspired to make me forget this past spring and summer, but I see that my mums are loaded with buds anyway. It’s just possible that Nature also delights in sending gardeners a bit of comfort when we most need it.
Even the little fall blooming crocuses—Crocus speciosus and Crocus sativus—are enhanced by the October light. They are so close to the ground that you would think the light would pass right over them, but it does not work that way. The pale blue and blue-purple chalices look ordinary on a gray day and magical when touched by the October sunlight. On sunny days, people exclaim over the crocuses in tones usually reserved for big, showy hydrangeas or iris.
I have always like Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem”, released in 1992. Canadian writer Louise Penny used part of the refrain—“how the light gets in”– as a book title several years ago. The entire verse goes,
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.…”
In the fall, the “crack” in even the most perfect garden is a moment in time when Nature allows the golden October light to get in.