This is the month of harvest. The crops usually begin with rye and oats,
proceed with wheat, and finish with pease and beans. Harvest-home is
still the greatest rural holiday in England, because it concludes at
once the most laborious and most lucrative of the farmer's employments,
and unites repose and profit. Thank heaven, there are, and must be,
seasons of some repose in agricultural employments, or the countryman
would work with as unceasing a madness, and contrive to be almost as
diseased and unhealthy as the citizen. But here again, and for the
reasons already mentioned, our holiday-making is not what it was. Our
ancestors used to burst into an enthusiasm of joy at the end of harvest,
and even mingled their previous labour with considerable merry-making,
in which they imitated the equality of the earlier ages. They crowned
the wheat-sheaves with flowers, they sung, they shouted, they danced,
they invited each other, or met to feast as at Christmas, in the halls
of rich houses; and, what was a very amiable custom, and wise beyond the
commoner wisdom that may seem to lie on the top of it, every one that
had been concerned, man, woman, and child, received a little present,
ribbons, laces, or sweetmeats.
The number of flowers is now sensibly diminished. Those that flower
newly are nigella, zinnias, polyanthuses, love-apples, mignonette,
capsicums, Michaelmas daisies, auriculus, asters or stars, and
China-asters. The additional trees and shrubs in flower are the
tamarisk, altheas, Venetian sumach, pomegranates, the beautiful
passion-flower, the trumpet flower, and the virgin's bower or clematis,
which is such a quick and handsome climber. But the quantity of fruit is
considerably multiplied, especially that of pears, peaches, apricots,
and grapes. And if the little delicate white flowers have at last
withdrawn from the hot sun, the wastes, marshes, and woods are dressed
in the luxuriant attire of ferns and heaths, with all their varieties of
green, purple, and gold. A piece of waste land, especially where the
ground is broken up into little inequalities, as Hampstead-heath, for
instance, is now a most bright as well as picturesque object; all the
ground, which is in light, giving the sun, as it were, gold for gold.
Mignonette, intended to flower in winter, should now be planted in pots,
and have the benefit of a warm situation. Seedlings in pots should have
the morning sunshine, and annuals in pots be frequently watered.
In the middle of this month, the young goldfinch broods appear, lapwings
congregate, thistle-down floats, and birds resume their spring songs:--a
little afterwards flies abound in windows, linnets congregate, and bulls
make their shrill autumnal bellowing; and towards the end the beech tree
turns yellow,--the first symptom of approaching autumn.[1]
[1] _The Months_.
* * * * *