Sunday Stroll - Farewell to August

On this last day of August, suggestions of Autumn hover over these fields, like... well, like a bumblebee over thistle. I began my stroll today in the front garden, snapping another photo of the swallowtail caterpillars congregating on the fennel, and the tiny emerging leaves of a poppy that I bought this year and thought I lost to heat and drought. I noticed, again, that some industrious gardener ought to get a shovel and/or some heavy gloves and pull this "picker" so the orange mum can stretch out a little more.

I headed around the house and down the hill to the butterfly garden. I took a photo of the blue balloon flowers, but it was the masses of bright goldenrod growing behind the undefined edges of the garden that caught my eye. The wild edges called to me then, and soon I was down in the field surrounded by bees, and butterflies, and whirring grasshoppers.

I noticed so many things changing color and form at nature's pace; the seasons turning like an impossibly slow pirouette in a wild ballet. The berries on the viburnum are deeply blue, and the autumn olives vividly red. The cattails, like a bold exclamation point at the edge of the pond, are making an autumn fashion statement in brown velvet.

Through the windows of the Quiet Country House one sees both Summer and Autumn, briefly intertwined, before the season changes and we bid farewell for another year, not just to August, but to Summertime.

photos by Aisling, August 31, 2008 1) bumble bee on thistle 2) orange mum, cult. warm igloo 3) blue balloon flowers and wild goldenrod 4) Joe Pye Weed 5) Honeybee on wild Boneset 6) wild purple asters 7) Autumn Olive 8) cattails 9) the southern gable end of the Quiet Country House