Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Okay, so it’s another sunny Sunday morning – just how I like my days, a fresh touch in the air and Mother Nature painting the trees in beautiful shades of Autumn. It is a split between autumn and spring as to which season is my favourite. Spring is a re-birth of life, new plants and fresh bold primary colours – sparkling Snowdrops, dazzling Daffodils and twinkling Tulips. Autumn is a quiet repose, reds, browns, russets, bronzes and golds, a rich time before the little death that is Winter.

Those pesky squirrels are digging up the bulbs I have planted and are burying them around my garden or in other pots – no wonder things keep growing where I haven’t planted them, well sometimes I get nice surprises, perhaps a peach tree starts growing where I had planted a tulip or a miniature oak tree pushes its way out of one of my hanging baskets – I could have sworn I planted some crocus bulbs there??

The local foxes have started preparing themselves for the oncoming mating season, ripe musky smells from scent marking males are all over my garden, why the vixens find this smell attractive I will never know. The foxes are looking particularly fine at the moment, sleek and fat with beautiful shiny russet coats, now if I was a vixen that would probably be more of a turn on – heh heh!! In the next couple of weeks I am sure to be woken up by the blood curdling screams of foxes in the throes of passion – lucky foxes!!

I am off now to make myself and my sons a late breakfast or brunch as we brits like to call it – all the mundane things that need doing and should be done are calling to me, but I am finding myself drawn outside again.

One more look before it all fades away….



John Keats - To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.



Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.



Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

This is one of my all time favourite poems – enjoy.

Until the next time my friends.

Jo xx