On lazy clouds, and the softness of November

Bramble and Briar #65

The dew seems to be particularly drawn to the seedheads of Althaea cannabina

There’s a softness to the garden in November. Quite literally so – it starts to get a little doughy underfoot around now. This can be deeply pleasing, such as when you find your foot sinking luxuriantly into the spongy depths of a pillow of green moss, or rather less joyous, as a muddy pudding threatens to swallow the light and decidedly un-waterproof footwear you’d thought, until just now, that you’d gotten away with. These box fresh trainers? They’ll be fine, it’s just a quick dash over the lawn...

That’ll learn you.

It never does, of course, and by ‘you’ I mean, naturally, ‘me’.

But the November softness extends to more than merely ground conditions. It’s in the gently diffuse light; grass, soil, plants, fallen leaves – rather than being spotlit from above, everything seems to radiate its brightness just now, irrespective of cloud cover. The colour temperature changes – cool blues for cloudy days, hotter hues for clear blue skies – but the natural world is inwardly lit just the same, and perhaps it always is, an effect too subtle to penetrate the dazzle of the summer sun. Reds glisten and pop, the Christmas card glow of a robin’s breast, a rosehip, or the postbox down the road. Yellows and oranges crackle, bronzes burnish and greens, where they persist, seem somehow all the greener by contrast. A riot of colour comes, but it’s the politest kind of commotion, an ASMR rave that fades into a whisper as the sun, increasingly early, starts to set.

The softness extends into to the air, inhabits the very space between us where it becomes visible as tiny droplets of water held in suspense. We are living in a cloud, the clouds themselves, like us, feeling the weight of the passing year upon them, too tired to heave themselves up into the sky and content to hang around with us, upon the ground. Hydrating – good for the skin, if not so much for drying the washing (indoors we have entered the season where the stairwell becomes a drying room, unless anyone threatens to come around, at which point the bedroom transforms into a laundry). When it rains, it rains, but even when it it stops, it’s rarely quite dry. Because of the lazy cloud, which might get airborne for a few days in a row, but touches back down regularly, as if it’s grown scared of heights. I sympathise, and grow fond of gardening in the muffled dewy twighlight, in which even sound seems to have growth lethargic, and only the songs of birds has the power to cut through with clarity.

If you’ve been looking for a way to escape from the busyness of life all year, then you could do worse than come into the garden in November. Solitude starts here.

Just like its cousin, the ivy, the fatsia launches loudly and brazenly into flower around Halloween

It’s a bit damp, and a bit chilly, though not bitingly cold yet. Sufficient to make it a little less than comfortable unless you’re particularly well prepared, and fickle enough to throw an unexpected mild spell at you, frustrating your best efforts at dressing for a spell of autumn gardening (wool is invariably the answer. A thick, pure wool jumper will keep you warm or cool as needed, and is suprisingly drizzle proof. Ask a sheep). Most people aren’t mad keen on spending time outside in these conditions, unless they’re doing something particularly energetic, like cycling, or running, or striding across the fells. Clearing an overgrown area of garden feels like a good job to work up a sweat – hacking things down, raking them up, loading them into a wheelbarrow and carting them around the place. Maybe a good session of mulching. Shovelling. Spreading. But anything less vigorous, anything requiring more thought, and less flamboyant movement – that takes a different mindset. But if you can get used to gardening in this soft, slow manner, if you can settle into that groove and learn to love how it feels, it becomes your thing. Your place. And there’s a quiet kind of power in that.

You can understand why it’s not for everyone. It’s getting colder, and darker and, looking around, everyone’s starting to get that pinched look. Life happens, the sun stops warming your body, you have to start wearing unreasonable layers of clothing and all your muscles begins to pull on one another. No wonder everything starts to pucker up. I wonder if I look a bit pinched, and decide I might do when I’m not in gardening mode, when I’m dashing from one thing to the next, trying not to get too wet. Denying the weather, and the season. The garden, though, seems to hold the antidote to looking and feeling pinched, and as soon as I enter this familiar and welcoming space, I can feel my shoulders drop and my face relax and everything starts to ease. There’s not much left that you can do in the garden for this year. Any gardening hours we put in now are an investment in the next growing season, though the process itself pays dividends which we can access directly, in terms of our own health and mental wellbeing. There’s plenty to be done from this point until the end of winter, but now, as autumn hits its stride, the pressure’s really off. And as long as I remember to keep coming here and breathing in that lazy cloud, day after day, then that November softness isn’t just a feature of the outdoors, or a facet of my garden. It’s a windfall for me, too, and I’ll carry it with me, and in me, throughout the next few weeks.