Christina Rossetti’s August Windfalls: Nature’s Quiet Decay and the Garden of the Self
Today's Garden Words were featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
Words inspired by the garden are the sweetest,
most beautiful words of all.
August 29,2019
On this day, as August breathes her parching wind across the land, we take a moment to pause among our cornfields and low hills, just as the English poet Christina Rossetti once observed.
Her lines capture the subtle, almost whispered conversation between the earth and the drying breeze.
In "A Year's Windfalls," Rossetti paints a scene of late summer's tender decline with such exquisite precision that every gardener, whether seasoned or novice, will find a shade of their own summer's end in her words.
She writes:
"In the parching August wind,
Cornfields bow the head,
Sheltered in round valley depths,
On low hills outspread.
Early leaves drop loitering down
Weightless on the breeze,
First-fruits of the year's decay
From the withering trees."
Picture those weary cornfields bowing, not in defeat but in graceful acknowledgment of the season’s passage.
The low hills, spread out like a painter’s palette of soft gold and green, cradle the fragile dance of early leaves as they twirl weightlessly to the earth. It is the garden’s version of a parting smile, the first-fruits of nature’s slow preparation for rest.
This is not melancholy, but a sacred pause — the garden’s gentle sigh after months of growth.
Christina Rossetti, you see, is no stranger to garden lovers. Besides the evocative imagery found in her poetry, she gifted us two of the most beloved Christmas carols: "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "Love Came Down at Christmas," hymns that echo the same reverence for nature’s cycles and the human spirit.
And she once confessed, with a truth that every gardener holds dear, that "My garden cannot be anything other than my self."
How perfectly apt this sentiment feels, especially in August, when the garden reflects not only the toil but the soul of its keeper.
As you wander through your patch of earth this August, take a leaf from Rossetti’s book.
Watch the early leaves fall, not as loss but as quiet gifts.
Observe the cornfields bow and the hills hold their breath. In the parching August wind, there is a story being told: a story of beauty, surrender, and renewal that every gardener is privileged to witness.