Last week I knelt down to weed one bed after work and stood up in the dark with half of it still to do. I had not been slow. I had simply budgeted for a kind of evening we do not get any more, and I have been thinking about that miscalculation ever since, in the garden and well beyond it.

"Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood."

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth

(7 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

One evening last week I came in from work, changed into the jeans that live by the side of bed, and went out to weed a bed I had been stepping past for a fortnight. It was light. It was the soft, tired light of a weekday evening in October, but it was light, and I remember thinking I had an hour in it, give or take.

I had about forty minutes.

It did not fade the way it fades in summer, slowly enough that you can keep working and barely notice. It went. At some point I realised I was pulling things up by feel rather than by sight, that I could not tell the creeping buttercup from the self-sown foxgloves, and that the trug beside me had become a dark shape on a darker lawn. I knelt there for a minute longer than was sensible, as though the light might reconsider. It didn't. I went in with half a bed done and soil up to my wrists, feeling slightly foolish and quite a lot worse than half a bed of weeds really deserves.

That last part is the bit I want to be honest about.

What the light is actually doing

Here in King's Lynn the sun is setting just after six. In midsummer we had nearly seventeen hours of daylight; by the shortest day, the twenty-first of December, we will have a little over seven and a half. The difference has to come from somewhere, and at this point in the year it comes quickly. Right now we are losing close to four minutes of daylight every single day. Over a week, that is more than twenty-five minutes. The evening I was weeding was not my imagination; the evening before had genuinely been longer.

And then on Sunday the 25th the clocks go back, and the whole thing lurches an hour earlier in one night. Sunset slips to before five, and by December it will be going down before quarter to four.

The reason it feels so sudden is that we do not keep a running total. We carry a sense of how long an evening is, and that sense was set in June, out there with a watering can until gone nine. Our bodies are still working off that timetable. The light is not.

I thought I had longer. Most of us do, this time of year.

The other darkness

I am going to say this plainly, because it would be a strange sort of honesty if I left it out.

I hate the dark evenings. Not mildly, not in the way people grumble about the weather. Every year, round about now, I start to dread the stretch that is coming: leaving for work in the dark, coming home in the dark, the garden reduced to whatever I can see of it from inside on a Saturday. And every year, more or less on schedule, my mood goes with the light. It does not dip; it drops. Things that are easy in June become heavy in November. I get shorter with people I love. I sit down after tea and the evening has gone before I have decided what to do with it.

I am not telling you this to be dramatic. I am telling you because I suspect a good number of you know exactly what I mean, and because for years I treated it as a private failing, a sort of laziness that arrived with the autumn and that I ought to be able to push through. I don't think that any more. It is what happens to a lot of us when the light goes, and it happens to some people much more heavily than it happens to me. If yours is heavier, if it is more than a low and it stays, it has a name and it is common, and it is worth saying so to someone who can help. Saying it out loud is part of why I am writing this one.

I am not the only one in our house who feels it, either. Cody has started complaining that he cannot play football for as long as he wants after school; he is six, and a game with no end time is his idea of a right. Olivia, eleven since Saturday, cannot go out on her scooter at the front with her friend once the light starts to go, because of the cars coming and going along our road. Neither of them has the words for it, but I know what it is. The dark makes everyone's world smaller. For a while it takes away the part of the day that was ours.

What the eye still sees

A few evenings after the weeding, I was standing at the big bi-fold doors at the back, the ones we fling open all summer and now keep firmly shut. The garden had more or less gone. And then, in the very last of the light, something moved across the top of it: birds, a few of them, going over in the dusk. I could not have told you what they were. They were barely outlines, shapes against a sky only slightly less dark than they were. But I saw them clearly, when I could no longer see the border three metres from my feet.

The thing that had stayed visible was not colour. It was movement.

It turns out there is a good reason for that, and it is the most useful thing I have learned this autumn.

Our eyes have two kinds of light-sensing cell. One kind handles colour and fine detail, and it needs good light to work. The other is far more sensitive and keeps going long after the first has given up, but it cannot see colour at all. What it is very good at is contrast and movement. At dusk, the eye hands the job from one to the other. That is why the reds in a border are the first thing to go black, why the whites and pale things seem to glow for a while after everything else has dimmed, and why a moving shape catches your attention when a still one would vanish. Those low-light cells also sit mostly away from the centre of the eye, so a faint thing at dusk is often easier to see if you look very slightly to one side of it rather than straight at it.

Which is how I come to the grasses.

I have written before about the Karl Foersters standing upright in both back borders, and how a few weeks ago they were lit gold by the low September sun. That gold has gone with the hour I have lost. But in the last of the evening now, from inside, they are still the final thing in the garden I can see. Pale, almost white in the dusk, and moving, always moving, even when there is barely any wind to speak of. Every colour has left the borders and they are still there, swaying, both of the things my eye can still catch at once.

I stand and watch them most evenings now. It is one of the few parts of this time of year I would not swap.

Budgeting for less light

I have been turning the weeding over, and I think the mistake I made that evening is the same one I make with my mood every winter.

I go into October expecting June. I make plans for the evenings as though I will have the energy of a long light evening, and when I don't, I take it as evidence that something is wrong with me. Half a bed, and I came in feeling like a failure; the truth was that I had planned for an hour of light and been given forty minutes. Nobody would blame a gardener for that. I was quite ready to blame myself.

What I want to do differently this year is budget honestly. Less light means less evening, and less evening means fewer things done in it, and that is not a moral position; it is arithmetic. In the low months I want to stop trying to see the whole garden and look instead for the things that still show up: a bit of movement, something pale, a shape going over at the very end of the day. A short conversation in the car. Ten minutes outside at lunchtime. A child explaining, at length, why football should not have a finishing time.

None of that is the colour of June. All of it is still there.

And I have been reminded, this past week, that you do not have to carry the short season on your own. The greenhouse glass, which some of you have been following with more interest than it deserves, is finally clean. I did not clean it. My dad did. Mum and Dad have both retired and have started coming over to help at the allotment, and at some point last week he looked at the greenhouse, looked at me, and quietly got on with it. I have been saying "I'll do it this weekend" since the end of September. He did it in an afternoon.

I felt a flicker of embarrassment about that, and then mostly gratitude. When the light is short, there is no prize for doing everything yourself.

For the record, the rest of last Thursday's jobs are done. The wallflowers are in, the tired clump is divided, and the broad beans are sown at the allotment. The lawn has settled after the rain with no great change I can see, which is exactly what it should look like when the work is happening underneath. Olivia had a lovely birthday in Birmingham and came home with two new Jellycats, a Scottie dog and a lion. There were far too many people for me. She did not notice a single one of them, which is the right way round.

Planting and living for the light you actually have

Practical, and short, because the fortnight before the clocks change is a window worth using.

Put something pale where you will see it from inside. Over the next few months, most of us will see our gardens through a window at dusk more than any other way. Stand where you actually stand in the evening, at the back door, at the kitchen sink, at the bi-folds, and look at what is in front of you. Pale grasses, white-flowered plants, silver foliage and seedheads are the things that hold on longest as the light goes. If the view is all dark green and red, that will be the first part to disappear.

Leave the grasses standing. If you have them, do not cut them down for tidiness. A standing grass gives you movement at dusk all winter, frost in January, and birds working the seedheads in between. They come down in late winter, just before the new growth, and not before.

Move your garden time to the light you have. Weekday evenings are almost finished as gardening time, and fighting that only ends in half-weeded beds and a bad mood. Shift the jobs to weekend mornings, and if you can, get outside for even ten minutes in the middle of a working day. Daylight on an overcast October lunchtime is still many times brighter than a well-lit room, and I notice the difference in myself when I bother.

Clean the glass, or let someone else. With the light this low, every bit of grime on a greenhouse or cold frame costs your plants something they cannot afford. Wash it now, before the clocks change and the weekends shrink. And if someone offers to do it for you, let them. I can recommend it.

The light will keep going for a while yet. But the grasses are still out there at the end of every evening, and I know where to look.

Budget for Less Light Than You Think. I went out to weed for an hour and was given forty minutes, and I came in blaming myself for the difference. The evenings are shorter now and so is our energy in them. Planning for that is not giving up; it is just being honest about the hours we have.

In the Dusk, Look for What Moves. When the colour goes, the eye still catches what is pale and what is moving: the grasses in the last of the light, the birds going over, a child running after a ball. The low months take away the detail. They leave us the small, living things, if we know where to look.

The Light Turns on the Twenty-First. The darkest stretch has a date in the diary, and it is not far off. After the shortest day the evenings start giving back, a minute at a time, so slowly you will not notice until one evening in February you look up from the garden and realise it is still light. It always comes back. It always has.

Gary Stewart writes every week from a small garden on Norfolk clay.

No expertise, no ideal garden, just what the soil taught him that week.

Written slowly, at the speed of the garden, for people who read every word.