A Snapshot of Garden Life Just Before November

This afternoon I cycled to the allotment gardens again.

The plant life is settling back into the ground as always in late autumn, figments of leaves (green and red and yellow, with pale underbellies like fish) and pink rose petals plucked off the trees and bushes and shrubs and melting into the grass, gravel, and earth, against dark wooden posts and tree trunks, garden sheds and evergreen trees. But instead of the vinegary scent of rotting apples or other whiffs of decay, the air was relatively fresh and I only caught an occasional trace of rose blossoms.

Besides the rose haws and late flowers, orange berries, Virginia creeper leaves, and late red apples that had partly fallen on the grass — tattered and drying late purple asters and the odd hidden nasturtium blossom in flaming colour, were adding life to the scene. A bird flew overhead to a hidden congregation of crows.

2023 was not a great year for grapes due to the better rainfall and scanter sunlight. They were more sour and less flavorful than last year, and began to sag in September; now a lot of them seem to have dropped from the vines instead of enduring, round and sweet, late into winter's frosts as they did last year.

In one of the garden plots, the pumpkins that were hanging from vines like orange lanterns have disappeared; so I think have the beans, and the ginger blossoms are shrivelling after being bright and beautiful for several months. But the dark, long kale is thriving, and the chili peppers planted alongside it in the same raised bed have ripened.

Leafy tree species are, of course, losing leaves at different rates. One species is almost entirely bare; but the spiry thin cottonwoods are largely green, for example. The amply leaved oaks beside the gardens, with their high-arched autumnal warren of shadows and tree trunks and rain-wettened asphalt path beneath, suggested a Thoreau-era New England in early autumn, even if (almost?) all of their acorns seem to have been shed already.

Other people worked, went for walks or bicycle trips, or met with friends, in the garden enclosures and the paths; but they were lost amongst the shrubbery. The brooding grey sky exuded the same heavy, sound-dampening feeling as the sky after snowfall.

Passages of poetry (that I've probably quoted before in this blog) recurred to memory.

Keats:

The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Byron, where my 'sea' was instead the wind in the trees and the distant roar of cars:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
⁠By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar

I came home with three red apples more or less the size of walnuts, more like Christmas tree decorations than like edible fruit in appearance.