Autumn’s performers from my garden

Autumn is one of the most amazing seasons of the year and I found it in my garden and places around me. Then I took the photographs during autumn.

Enjoy the photograph at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12759802@N07

In Australia, the arrival of autumn takes on rich colors and glow in mellow light. There is something quite special about the atmosphere of an autumn season. The autumn in Australia starts on March 1 and ends on May 31.

Autumn's association with the transition from warm to cold weather, and its related status as the season of the primary harvest, has dominated its themes and popular images. In Western cultures, personifications of autumn are usually pretty, well-fed females adorned with fruits, vegetables, grains and wheat that ripen at this time. Most ancient cultures featured autumnal celebrations of the harvest, often the most important on their calendars. Still extant echoes of these celebrations are found in the mid-autumn Thanksgiving holiday of the United States, and the Jewish Sukkot holiday with its roots as a full moon harvest festival of "tabernacles" (huts wherein the harvest was processed and which later gained religious significance). There's also the many North American Indian festivals tied to harvest of autumnally ripe foods gathered in the wild, the Chinese Mid-Autumn or Moon festival, and many others. The predominant mood of these autumnal celebrations is a gladness for the fruits of the earth mixed with a certain melancholy linked to the imminent arrival of harsh weather. (wikipedia)

Ode to Autumn
by John Keats
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 findThee 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.

Autumn
By Kalidasa

THE autumn comes,

a maiden fair In slenderness and grace,

With nodding rice-stems in her hair And lilies in her face.

In flowers of grasses she is clad;

And as she moves along,

Birds greet her with their cooing glad Like bracelets' tinkling song.

A diadem adorns the night Of multitudinous stars;

Her silken robe is white moonlight,

Set free from cloudy bars;

And on her face (the radiant moon) Bewitching smiles are shown:

She seems a slender maid,

who soon Will be a woman grown.

Over the rice-fields, laden plants Are shivering to the breeze;

While in his brisk caresses dance The blossomed-burdened trees;

He ruffles every lily-pond Where blossoms kiss and part,

And stirs with lover's fancies fond The young man's eager heart.

This English translation of "Autumn" was composed by Arthur W. Ryder (1877-1938

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.- Stanley Horowitz

There is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

- George Eliot

In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil. And at no season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb colour effects as from August to November.- Rose G. Kingsley, The Autumn Garden, 1905

The milkweed pods are breaking,And the bits of silken downFloat off upon the autumn breezeAcross the meadows brown.- Cecil Cavendish, The Milkweed

Winter is cold-hearted.Spring is yea and nay,Autumn is a weather-cock,Blown every way.Summer days for me.When every leaf is on its tree. - Christina Rossetti

Lo! sweeten’d with the summer light,

The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,

Drops in a silent autumn night.

All its allotted length of days

The flower ripens in its place,

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,

Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.

- Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters

In the other gardens

And all up the vale,

From the autumn bonfiesSee the smoke trail!
Pleasant summer overAnd all the summer flowers,

The red fire blazes,the grey smoke towers.
Sing a song of seasons!Something bright in all,

Flowers in the summerFires in the fall!
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Autumn Fires

Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?

- Hal Borland


cirrus sky hawk driftblue haze in the autumn airand my mouth is dry.- Greg Boddy

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sitBeneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe;And all the daughters of the year shall dance!Sing now the lusty song of fruit and flowers.

- William Blake, To Autumn, 1783

When I speakMy lips feel cold - The autumn wind.- Basho