11.17 Spare Beauty

The garden has a spare, glinty beauty today. It rained last night, and the sun flared out suddenly this morning. Some more leaves have come down. I was sorry to lose them from the trees, but they glistened on the ground, the orange maple leaves from a volunteer tree sheltering under the oak lending a color patch next to a fence and the burnished cherry tree leaves circling around the garden’s focal center.
Big dark-blue berries on an evergreen planted in front of the evergreen fence. The caramel leaves of the chocolate flower decaying into tissue paper, soft material against the still solid foliage of the grasses, the evergreens and a butterfly bush which for some reason maintains its green as if it were July. The deep red foliage of the Japanese maple bush full at its own feet like flowers tossed before royalty.
Flattened yellow spears of the day lilies mingle with brown tree leaves. The spirea holds its foliage. The leaves of the plumbago have a deep rusty-iron red. The low, light-green thyme groundcover mats are still bright – like grass, like the parsley in the vegetable plot, they like this time of year – but are striped now with brown leaves.
I cut down some stalks last weekend – perennials, cone flowers, balloon flowers, everything that had given up the ghost and was wearing out its gaunt, harvest season welcome. Removing that layer of fading foliage and stems spared down and sharpened the look of the back garden landscape.
The space has a composition as a whole because, like a wild place, there’s enough variety. The colors and textures and different shapes and sizes weave together in a natural way. The garden is a miniature park. I wander along the maze of the curving paths, getting lost – mentally, that is – for a few moments here and there. That’s what you want. That’s the point.

11.16 November Cool

It’s a gray day. A little flash of mostly sunlit sky earlier this morning, highlighting the autumn colors in the garden, but now we’ve settled into a kind of a mild overcast. But the gold and bronzed colors still stand out. The weeping cherry tree hangs at its peak, a lighter yellow-orange mingling with darker bronzed-orange leaves.
It’s not cold. It’s not “a beautiful fall day” – words which suggest deep blue sky and a crown of October-yellow trees. There will be no blue sky today.
But what we have is perfect in its own way. It’s the perfect “cool, gray day.” Not cold. Not windy, no wind at all. Very still and meditative. The world keeping a low profile and mulling things over.
Walking down a street, any ordinary residential street, on a day like this is evocative. It evokes all the other such days – and there are a lot of them. Walking home at lunchtime in elementary school. After school in junior. Is there a school yard nearby, the sound of a basketball? The cool gray days of childhood, youth, middle age.
The day is redolent of all other such days, which if you add them up, would probably produce a very high total. The days before winter starts; the days when winter ends. This one reminds you of things. What it mostly reminds you of is being alive.
I start in my own garden, then walk around a block. Add a few more blocks, turning the world into a garden.
The empty sidewalks, silent houses, quiet landscape tell their story. It’s a story about a still, cool, comfortable, palpably thoughtful mid-November day. And nobody, which is to say everybody, is telling it.

11.10 Acquainted with the Twilight

A day passes, then another. I’m still staring out the window (well, with breaks).
The western sky turns gold at four-eighteen today. There’s hardly been any sun all week, but this evening there’s just enough to smear a partly clear sky with a golden and pink haze of November sunsets.
All months have great sunsets, but in no month are they more important than in November, when we are re-acquainted with The Dark. I am one, Frost tells us, who is acquainted with the night. But really, Robby, we’re all pretty familiar with those dark nights of both soul and body. And in the northern latitudes those nights come very soon in November.
November is the shock month for sun-worshippers – or dark-cringers (for whom declining sunlight gives a case of the SAD) – because of our quaint, civilized habit of screwing around with the clock. Since we run our lives by the clock – it’s pretty much the most important tool we have (after language, maybe), for millions of us the clock says when to go to work and when we can leave – lurching back an hour precisely at the time of year when sunlight is dribbling out of our daily quotient at a rate which made primitive folks “light beseeching fires” and which still worries our inner savage with the dim possibility that we may be running out of it altogether is something of a shock. It’s a wake-up, so to speak, when what we want to do is go to sleep.
People who make a practice of staring at the western sky at the end of the day do so this month at an abruptly earlier time of “day” – to use the word loosely – because we’re used to thinking that our labors run from “sun to sun.”
At the moment, however, now 4:37, the crimson tides of the heavens have taken over half the visible firmament above our heads, a virtuoso display by the Early Evening Painters of November Skies. As if to prove something.
I think it’s proven. I am astonished, shaken to my roots. Cosmic influences really do run the show. Light and darkness tell us what to do. And when we mess with the rhythm, our psyches scurry like un-hilled ants.
Admittedly, we’ve loused up the original signals by the invention of artificial light. And our profit for it, to paraphrase Caliban, is we know how to work. Long days in the office, at the computer, minding the shop, caring for kids, continue regardless of nature’s signals. (One thing, though, aside from scraping away at some leaves there’s not much to do in the garden.)
Peasant farmers knew what to do in the winter. They rested up. They took it for granted that by mid-summer day they’d be working sixteen hour days once again and feeling rather good about the prospect of having a crop. But in winter it was time for the farmer to drink up his cider, as one of those childhood rhymes had it. Time to climb under a forgiving haystack and sleep away dull hours. Increasingly there will be less to do (and less to eat) as the cold months deepen, then wear away at the edges.
We’re supposed to go with the flow, but these days we have to go against it. Not so hard to do in brilliant October, the Disney season of psychedelic nature, but suddenly we’ve been short-weighted in a bargain we didn’t know we made.
Nevertheless, sunset’s earlier arrivals, its importuning twilights, make us pay attention to the big picture by the simple device of arriving so much earlier.
Sunset’s pink-lavender extravagance (at four forty-four) has been rolled up by a sudden accession of cloud bank, except for a deepening glow-field banding the horizon and putting a dark pink background behind the black silhouettes of bare trees.
Now look at it, a few minutes later, suddenly a stunning violet-dark, everything Flemish tinted, a Rembrandt in every window. It’s almost worth that extra hour.

11.8 Bare Statements

November is the hardest month of the year, because it gives us the best part of the day before we’re ready for it. It’s happening in the fours this week, as most of the country turns back the clocks to daylight standard time. It’s happening now, right now. My windows darkening, perceptibly, by the minute, as I sit in an artificially lighted interior. Every time I glance over there is less definition, less to see (I suppose, since we prefer to see distinctions, not undifferentiated planes), darkness filling in more of those shapes still visible. Trunks of a tree; of course; what would there be in the sun-short months of the northern latitudes? The façade of a neighbor’s house, dimming around the lighted rectangles of two well-set windows, like eyes cut carefully in a jack-o-lantern.
Above, between the branches, the sky is a single shade of inky purple, the foreground nothing but a darkening blur. Soon reflections of those lights from inside the room will eat up all there is in the visual field of a darkening window.
It’s the big change, which takes place at the end of each day (some days a lot more clearly than others), the cosmos big-footing in and defining our condition. It’s astronomy’s big statement, and it’s easier to catch it when sunset comes so early in the course of clock-driven “day” – which is of course, not over, though the magical closing hour of five o’clock is fast approaching.
It’s not easy to appreciate, however, because in the human-measured time of day, we’re still on the job; or, worse, gob-smacked in the commute. Where did the day go?…

11.1 Cold Front

Once again tearing a page off the calendar has correlated with a pronounced change in the weather. Cold and clear, thirties this morning. I worried about the Mandeville rose, a conspicuous but exposed annual, sitting in an oversized pot on the corner of the patio. But it looked fine. The deep red tubular flowers, which age and drop in the manner of all flowers, are still doing their thing.
Our plan, or rather intention, is to take this plant indoors before the first real-frost day. But the pot is very big, filled with heavy soil, plus a wooden arbor frame for its climbing, twining branches, and doesn’t give much when I tried an experimental drag… We all know about good intentions.
Then, a few days later, we get a couple of rainy days. Not particularly cold, but a steady enough rain to bring down the colored leaves of October. Half of the orange-red leaves of the maple shade tree out front fell one day; the other half the next.
The rain stopped, but the leaves continued. The mulberry tree on the side of the house, which I risked life and limb trimming this summer, waited until the last week of October to turn, then went totally yellow on a long golden day as I kept turning my head to watch. One breezy, brighter day in the first week of November all those pale yellow leaves began slowly pouring out of the great pitcher of sky.
I went back to the salt marsh along the Quincy shoreline. Pretty much all the leaf-bearing plants there stripped bare too. Color in the marsh lives in low shrubs, saplings, and viney crawlers. Those deep reds and yellows I had enjoyed last week were passed now.
It grew cold, and clear. But breezy. I looked out the study window into the golden midday light to see a flotilla of brown leaves sweeping down. The oak tree? Even the oak, this soon? Memory suggests that the great oak out back held onto its rusty red-brown leaves a lot longer than the other trees in other years. What does it know that we don’t? (Well, a lot.)
November so far is a succession de-leaving days. It’s the opposite, I suppose, of succession planting in the spring.


November Rain

Beautiful trees, birds
Their calls falling through chill hours
Yellow leaves like rain

10.23 Late October, Home and Away

We didn’t bring the camera.
The sky was gray, the air cool, the atmosphere – melancholy.
Romantic melancholy, full of all that had passed.
The woods were sere, brown leaves thick on the paths below my feet. Red-leaved shrubs fired up along the roadsides.
The trees had a different look. Tightening up for the serious season. Toughing it. Letting go of superfluities, all of those light, fluttery, lacey sun-catchers. Summer stuff.

Late October, Berkshire Hills

A new look, sere, bare
Full of all that was passing
The trees? Fortitude

There are always two ways (at least) in the woods. Behind Stockbridge Bowl, the path off of Olivia’s Outlook, called the Walsh Trail, breaks time and time again. I take the first one toward the ridge. The red blaze on the tree looks thirty years old. Who has come this way and not returned?
Alone, with the chance to get lost by myself, I watch my step carefully. I will be gone long enough, but not too long. The trail is tricksy. I break off and reconnect time and time again. I find the view from the “Ridge Trail” which I remember from previous visits. Go a little further, a little higher. A second, relaxed sort of summit with a cleared top, where someone built a rude wooden bench long ago. I stand on the bench to get the best view. In one direction I am impressed to see a hillside about seventy percent bare of leaves, stands of evergreen interrupting stretches of bare branches. In the other direction the trees are still turning, with few or even no bare trees.
We drive home Saturday night, and on Sunday, back in Quincy, a city, discover more of the same business happening here among the trees.
The maple in front of the house is peaking. Orange-leafed, orange-red, some reddish spots too. Some plants in the perennial back garden show autumn colors as well. The leaves of the green-leaved evening primrose turn dark red, then drop. The blue-flowered balloon flowers turn a pale, ripe yellow, almost like beech trees in the wood. The ornamental grasses have tossed up their seed heads. A grass called Northern Sea Oats makes thin, flat-sided delicate seeds – like stamped coins in the shape of arrowheads – tiny embryos bared without much cover, and let their leaves fade to a dull gold.

Who hath not seen thee [Keats asks of Autumn] oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor…

He’s here too, all around us.

10.29 Carpet of Leaves

Orange leaves with red patches among them cover the walkway between the driveway and the house. The big maple fighting for space with power lines, beautiful for weeks, is now on its season-ending half-life for autumn color. Peaking, earlier this week. Then a rainy night; not a bad rain, a soft rain, but coming at just the wrong time for leaf maintenance. About half those perfect color orange leaves lay on the ground in the morning. They make a bright carpet around the house.
Now it is well known feature of the fall season that many people get in their automobiles and drive scores or even hundreds of miles into the “country,” to look at the color compositions of the New England woods. They drive and look, adding their share of carbon loading to the atmosphere, and stopping occasionally at designated view points.
Meanwhile back in the cities and towns of the same New England, folks can’t wait to wrap up every last fallen leaf and stuff them into bags, black plastic mainly though some have adopted the recyclable paper bags, and have them promptly removed. Hooray! they say, We’ve done it! Bare pavement once again!
What is this haste to reveal the impervious surface, the asphalt underpinning of settled American life?
Why not leave the still colored leaves on the ground where nature put them and enjoy the effect? The novelty will last at least a few weeks, then wear off as the leaves dry and turn brown. Then you can remove them, giving yourself good reason to spend a few hours outdoors in drear times.
Right now, though, while trees are thinning overhead, bald patches appearing here and there, the thick blanket of orange and yellow on the ground reflects the burnished orange in the cherry tree in the back garden and enlivens the scene from bottom to top.
The leaves of a pair of young rose of Sharon bushes turn yellow, the top-heavy structures looking like two lemon-yellow ice cream cones, the rusty-tawny leaves of a big hosta beside one of them complementing the color. The leaves of a recently added plumbago have turned a coppery red-brown, and the drying blossoms of a low hydrangea offer slashes of carmine.
But the biggest color field stretches from the crowns of the shade trees to the carpets of color those trees spread beneath their thinning canopies on the ground.
Why is anybody in a hurry to get rid of that?