Secret Garden

Our Urban Back Yard: Philadelphia, 2 October 2003
Though we had not a blade of grass in sight, Gerry still managed to create this delightful hidden retreat behind our urban row house in downtown Philadelphia. My favorite feature was the year - round white icicle lights twinkling against the white brick. This photograph looks summery, but in fact it was taken well after the official beginning of autumn, seven (7) years ago this very day, 2 October 2003. So late in the season, yet look at those full-bodied impatiens!

The flower bed, the robust bean vine, the trailing philodendron -- all perfectly capture the sentiment expressed by Elizabeth Jennings in her poem (posted earlier this week, scroll down or click), "Song at the Beginning of Autumn" :

. . . All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

. . . [yet] autumn gropes for us.

I can't say for sure how far beyond this early fall day the brilliant impatiens continued to flourish. Perhaps autumn was groping for them, but certainly at the moment of this photograph, they had never been happier.

As Roger McGough points out in his poem (posted last week, scroll down or click), "Trees Cannot Name the Seasons":

Nor flowers tell the time.
But when the sun shines
. . . they are charged with light . . .

They feel no need
To divide and itemize.
Nature has never needed reasons
For flowers to tell the time
Or trees put a name to the seasons.

~ a view of the back wall before Gerry restored the brick ~
For another view of the back garden,
see last October's post: "St. Peter's School - A Celebration,"
featuring my son Sam and his 4th grade teacher.

Childhood Autumn

Song at the Beginning of Autumn
Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child's cake would understand
The ambiguity of this --
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names --
Autumn and summer, winter, spring --
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.

Elizabeth Jennings, 1926 – 2001
Understated, unassuming, British poet


" . . . a childhood where / Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke
I lean against my window . . . "
This innocent autumn scene by artist Eloise Wilkin (1904-1987) appears in her illustrated edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses (click on the picture to enlarge the text for reading Stevenson's, "Autumn Fires"). Known for her darling portrayals of chubby-cheeked children, Wilkin worked for Simon & Schuster, illustrating Little Golden Books from 1943 - 1961.

I had a few of her books as a child, and the dreamy child-centric life depicted on those pages contributed greatly to the vision of a perfect world that danced in my little head. As for visions of sugar plums, I looked no further than the gingerbread house with windows of spun sugar in Wilkin's illustrated Hansel and Gretel, one of my earliest Little Golden Books.

More Examples of Wilkin's Charming Work
& on Pinterest

See also: "The Falling Fruit, The Certain Spring"
and "When I Said Autumnal Equinox"
for the related poem "The Burning of the Leaves" by Laurence Binyon