October’s Homeward Signs, Cut Flowers, and Primrose Discoveries

October 1, 2019

October, ever the philosopher among months, calls us home — not simply to hearth and family, but to memory itself.

The air carries the faint musk of woodsmoke and rain, the year’s end feels close enough to taste, and yet, beauty insists on lingering.

Today’s reflections gather three voices — Thomas Wolfe, Daniel Boorstin, and Eudora Welty — each offering a compass for moving through time, with reverence for what roots us.

All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea,
travelers to walls and fences,
hunters to field and hollow
and the long voice of the hounds,
the lover to the love he has forsaken.

– Thomas Wolfe

Wolfe invites us into October’s nostalgia — that bittersweet pull toward belonging.

His is a landscape of longing, where even motion itself becomes a search for home.

Gardeners know this ache well: the way hands return to the earth after months of wandering, the way every clearing of the beds feels like both farewell and reunion.

To tend a garden is always, quietly, to come home.

Trying to plan for the future without knowing the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.

– Daniel Boorstin, born on this day in 1914

With historian’s wit, Boorstin offers a metaphor that every gardener can feel in their bones.

Cut flowers — no matter how exquisite — cannot grow roots. His warning is tender but precise: knowledge sustains vision; memory nourishes progress.

In the garden and in life, growth without grounding will never last beyond the bloom.

Few things are riskier than ‘fine writing,’ but Miss Welty has never been afraid to risk it.

She spoke once in a conversation about plant explorers who go to Nepal and Sikkim, risking their lives to introduce Alpine flowers to gardens. ‘Now that's something — discovering new primroses — that's worth taking trouble with, worth risking something for,’ she said.

She seemed to set the plant explorers, bringing garden treasures from the Himalayas, over against the ordinary world we all live in every day.”

– From an interview with Eudora Welty, The Washington Post, 1972

In that single anecdote, Eudora Welty illuminates the kinship between art and gardening: both demand courage, curiosity, and a reverence for the unknown.

To “risk something” for beauty — whether in words or wildflowers — is to live abundantly.

The plant explorer and the writer share one goal: to bring the unseen into light, to make the mysterious bloom anew.

And so, on this late October day, let us take their words as quiet counsel. Return home, remember the roots, and be brave enough to go seeking beauty wherever it hides — even if it grows on the other side of the world.