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.\u00a0 On any sunny October Saturday, the light is mellow and golden, illuminating the plants in ways that are absent in summer.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That lessening of daylight triggers the garden chrysanthemums\u2019 bloom cycle, not to mention the coloring of leaves on deciduous trees.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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. \u00a0Near the maple is the young Carolina silverbell tree, which dazzles in spring with hundreds of pendulous white \u201cbells\u201d.\u00a0 The \u201cbells\u201d are long gone and now the leaves are a brilliant yellow, complementing the maple\u2019s blazing color.\u00a0 \u00a0I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
I try to keep the fallen leaves, beautiful though they are, out of the beds and borders where plants are still blooming.\u00a0 \u2018Sally Holmes\u2019, a single-flowered, hybrid musk rose is putting on a last show.\u00a0 Unlike many other roses, \u2018Sally\u2019 groups its white blooms into big, rounded clusters at the ends of the canes.\u00a0 In summer, my bush might have a score of these impressive \u00a0\u00a0clusters; 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.\u00a0 In the same bed, the striped rose, \u2018Scentimental\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n
The light\u2014or its absence\u2014may be speaking to the chrysanthemums, but at this moment the buds are still tightly shut.\u00a0 Prima donnas in their own right, they wait until they are just about the only show in the garden and then unfold their petals.\u00a0 Depending on weather conditions, I may have peach or pink garden mums to include in the Thanksgiving centerpiece.\u00a0 Of course, some years, I have had roses as well.\u00a0 Nature delights in making fools of those of us who try to predict her actions.<\/p>\n
Garden mums are a good investment for anyone looking for late season color.\u00a0 They are generally not the pinnacles of manicured perfection that you find in the so-called \u201chardy mums\u201d stocked by retailers, but the plants return faithfully every year in slowly-enlarging clumps.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is a good habit to develop and relatively easy to remember.\u00a0 Circumstances conspired to make me forget this past spring and summer, but I see that my mums are loaded with buds anyway.\u00a0 It\u2019s just possible that Nature also delights in sending gardeners a bit of comfort when we most need it.<\/p>\n
Even the little fall blooming crocuses\u2014Crocus speciosus and Crocus sativus\u2014are enhanced by the October light.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The pale blue and blue-purple chalices look ordinary on a gray day and magical when touched by the October sunlight.\u00a0 On sunny days, people exclaim over the crocuses in tones usually reserved for big, showy hydrangeas or iris.<\/p>\n
I have always like Leonard Cohen\u2019s song \u201cAnthem\u201d, released in 1992.\u00a0 Canadian writer Louise Penny used part of the refrain\u2014\u201chow the light gets in\u201d– as a book title several years ago.\u00a0\u00a0 The entire verse goes,<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cRing the bells that still can ring\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 Forget your perfect offering.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0 There is a crack in everything.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0 That’s how the light gets in.\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n In the fall, the \u201ccrack\u201d in even the most perfect garden is a moment in time when Nature allows the golden October light to get in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 On any sunny October Saturday, the light is mellow and golden, illuminating the plants in ways that are absent in summer.\u00a0\u00a0 While it gilds the landscape, the light … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1512,423,256,1511,267,1510,1509],"class_list":["post-1979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-sally-holmes","tag-chrysanthemums","tag-fall-crocus","tag-fall-foliage","tag-fall-gardening","tag-john-gardner","tag-october"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1980,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions\/1980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}