Thoughts on Autumn - Podcast and a Few Words

For some people autumn can be a time of melancholy and regret, for others it is a season of gold tinted joy. But even gloomy pessimists must look out at the Technicolor-countryside and be awed by the sheer beauty of the autumn when it puts on a really good display.

My father Peter Hesp certainly loved autumn - he painted the picture illustrating the podcast - it’s entitled Horner In Autumn.

Autumn in an Exmoor valley

Each year I look forward to seeing and experiencing the perfect examples of the genre. Endless blue skies will embrace a low sun that casts a clear golden light, quite unlike the light you see at any other time of year. The English countryside will look at its very best as long shadows throw everything into a soft and gentle series of highlights and profiles which run over hill and dale. 

The first wood smoke of the season will waft blue and serene above thatched cottages, deer will be bulving in the forests and locking antlers in sunlit stately parks, and everywhere there will be the rufous and the red, copper and bronze, auburn and mahogany. The arboreal world will turn brunette, henna’d and golden beyond belief.

Shadows of autumn begin to lengthen in our valley

Why are we treated to such a riot of colours? The answer is a sweet one. It all comes down to sugars. Plants use sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into glucose (they do it for food and energy) – and glucose, as every reader will know, is a kind of sugar. The brighter the summer – the more sugars there are.

Pheasant beaters in autumn - painting by Sue Onley

Sunlight and the cool nights of autumn turn this glucose into a red colour. The brown tints that you see in trees like oaks is made from wastes left in the leaves. 

Berries of autumn

As the green fades from the leaves, we begin to see the autumnal colours. These have been there all the time, but we haven’t been able to see them because in summer they are covered by green chlorophyll. 

From the copses of Cornwall to the dells of Devon and hillsides of Somerset, South West England is just beginning to turn aflame. Go out and glory in it while the great colour bonanza lasts, is what I say.

Lovers in an autumn birch wood - painting by Sue Onley

But perhaps we better leave the last words on the matter to John Keats, who was so moved by autumn he wrote an ode to it:

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.

More autumn trees in the valley