September’s Goldenrod and Autumn Gusts
Today's Garden Words were featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
Words inspired by the garden are the sweetest,
most beautiful words of all.
September 27, 2019
As the year deepens and daylight slants across the garden wall, autumn speaks in a quieter register — thoughtful, radiant, and unhurried.
Today’s selection gathers three voices, each devoted to the art of turning seasons: John Burroughs, Elizabeth Bowen, and Bonaro W. Overstreet.
Together, their words form an ode to maturity, to change, and to the melancholy splendor of letting go.
How beautiful leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
– John Burroughs
Burroughs, the naturalist philosopher, offers a truth every gardener knows by heart.
There is grace in fading. Even as chlorophyll drains from the leaves, their beauty becomes transcendent — translucent gold, copper, and flame catching the autumn light like stained glass.
The garden reminds us that age and radiance are not opposites, but companions.
Autumn arrives early in the morning but Spring at the close of the day.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen’s observation feels like a mystery wrapped in poetic timekeeping.
Autumn is brisk, clear, and wakeful — a season that sharpens the senses at dawn. Spring, however, whispers and lingers, a twilight softness.
Her contrast reminds us that every season holds its own rhythm, teaching us to notice not just change, but its tempo.
Autumn asks that we prepare for the future — that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping.
But it also asks that we learn to let go — to acknowledge the beauty of sparseness.
– Bonaro W. Overstreet
And then, as if closing the circle, Overstreet speaks the gardener’s creed. Autumn is not a season of loss, but of wisdom — a time to both store and surrender.
To harvest without hoarding, to prune with mercy, to trust that letting go is itself an act of faith.
Her words give shape to what our gardens teach us silently year after year: that beauty is richest when it is fleeting, and generosity is nature’s final gesture.
Today, let the leaves fall where they may. Let them shimmer as they go. In their descent lives the essence of all gardening — to love, to tend, to release.