Welcome to Autumn...

Yesterday was the Autumnal equinox - the day when day and night have approximately equal length. After this date, the days shorten each day until we reach the shortest day of the year in December.  At Hazel Cottage, its not only the leaves that are beginning to fall off the trees, we are in the middle of the hazel harvest (or glut!).  The spare bed is covered with hundreds of hazelnuts, drying gently.  Each day another handful (or basketful) falls from the skies.  We are now looking into nice ways of using them up.

The word autumn has French origins, the older English term for this season is 'fall', a contraction of "fall of the year".   The pilgrim fathers took the old word with them to the Americas (fall is still used today in the USA), but it gradually died out here in England and was replaced by autumn.

Autumn or fall is one of my favourite times of year - a sense of new beginnings, of harvesting nature's bounty.  The trees will start to change colour, the spiders are making webs everywhere and the seeds of the horse chestnut tree (known as conkers) start to hurtle to the ground.  The weather is warm and still again after several days of cooler weather, and we've had little flocks of starlings streaming into the garden for the last week or two.  The woodpecker is still with us, which is so exciting and I am impatient to plant out my tulip bulbs, but I really must wait until October at least. 

Conkers

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit.  Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
George Eliot