My 40 Day Autumn Challenge: 29.09.2023-07.11.2023
Autumn
40 Days ofd Seasonal Thoughts & Impressions
These images and thoughts below are fragmentory on purpose; they are intended to capture different snapshots of this season, being edited and expanded with each passing day.
End of September: Meadows. Currently one of my biggest joys: exploring the meadows that slope around the Altenburg hill above Bamberg, spending time in that infinite and ever-changing ecosystem, bending down and looking at life up close, moving between grassland and hedges teeming with insects, wildflowers, birds, rosehips, berries. Every season paints these hills in new colours. Right now, a large variety of pale pinks and bluish purples are complemented with creamy white dabs of Queen Anne’s lace flotsam. The meadowflowers’ evocative German names are like poetry; Wiesenflockenblume, Herbstzeitlose, Wiesenschaumkraut, Gamander-Ehrenpreis, Schafgarbe …
Here, my search for this week’s colour combinations is accompanied by one of my grandmother’s hand-crafted blue stoneware vases.
The early October vegetable patch: a place of solace and quiet joy and late-summer-early-autumn abundance, a place to sketch on a Sunday afternoon, a place to tend in meditation.
It’s the season for long rambling walks, for the very last of the wild plums, for harvesting apples in the garden, for slow transitions.
While October marches on and the first night frosts have hit us already, I’m documenting some of the wildflowers in my sketch book that are still to be found in the meadows this late in the season: mugwort, yarrow, knapweed, the occasional Queen Anne’s lace bobbing above the green sea, and some other stragglers too. Most spring and early summer blossoms are long gone.
It’s a time for collecting seeds, in the garden, at the road-side, in the fields. Now that I’ve watched flowers grow and unfold and blossom, I’ve seen their entire cycle of life and know their characteristics inside-out: I know the exact shade of yellow of that clump of St. John’s wort bushes, or the tantalizing aromatic smell of the cinnamon basil on my doorstep, or my favourite type of blue-bell. So it’s time to gather the promise of smells and flavours and colours and potential for next year.