October 3rd Reflections: Foxgloves, Apple Trees, and Philosophy of Plants

From the Poetical Birthday Book for October 3, 1887

Today’s selections drift like whispers from days past, offering delicate evocations of autumn’s fleeting beauty and the quiet wisdom that gardens impart.

The voices of poets and philosophers, spanning centuries and continents, remind us that the garden is a place of both reflection and revelation.

Her lips like foxgloves, pink and pale,
Went sighing like an autumn gale;
Yet, When the sunlight passed by,
They opened out with half a sigh.
Her smile, the last faint vesper light
As swoons the eve to sleep away,
Remaining through the summer night
A lamp of love by which to pray.

— Meta Orred, English Author & Poet

Orred’s image of foxglove lips and veiled smiles captures the gentle melancholy of autumn — the slow folding of light and the quiet fading of summer’s glow.

She frames the garden woman as a beacon of love and loss, whose radiance lingers long into the cooling evening.

All will pass like smoke of white apple trees
Seized by the gold of autumn.

I will no longer be young.

— Sergei Yesenin, Russian lyric poet, born on this day in 1895

Yesenin’s lines, steeped in the bittersweet, acknowledge the inevitability of change and the passing of youth.

His metaphor of apple trees smoking in autumnal gold mirrors the cycle every gardener witnesses — beauty set free, then surrendered to time.

In moral philosophy, it is useful, I believe, to think about plants.

— Philippa Foot, philosopher, born and died on this day (1920–2010)

Foot’s statement, though succinct, hints at the profound lessons the natural world offers — about growth, resilience, and ethical care. In the garden, philosophy is not abstract but embodied: every choice a gardener makes echoes larger questions of nurture and responsibility.

These voices, joined across time, invite us to reflect on autumn’s quiet teachings — its beauty, its impermanence, and the roots of wisdom buried deeply in the soil.