On Saturday evening I came back up the path with an empty watering can and stopped halfway, because the garden looked better than it has looked all year. I have done less to it this month than in any month since March. Nothing out there has changed. The light has.

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it."

— George Eliot

(7 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

Saturday, about ten past six, and I was coming back up the path with an empty can in one hand and a pair of secateurs I had been looking for since Thursday in the other. I was not admiring anything. I was going in.

Then I stopped, because the garden had gone gold.

The sun was sitting somewhere just above next door's roofline, coming in flat and sideways, and it was going straight through the Karl Foersters rather than down onto them. They are scattered through both of the back borders, and the ones with the sun behind them had stopped being grasses; each stem was a vertical bar of light, the whole plant lit from the inside, buff gone to something closer to bronze. The yew I cut on Tuesday was two different colours at once, nearly black on the shaded face and warm on the lit one, so the hedge looked cut from something more solid than a hedge. Even the shed, which is a shed, looked well.

I stood there like a man who had just been handed something.

And then, being the sort of person I am, I felt a bit of a fraud about it. Because here is what I have actually done in this garden in September. I cut the hedge. I put garlic in at the allotment. I cleared the base of the hedge and got a leaf cage up. That is close to the whole account. In June I was out there most evenings until the light went, watering and staking and deadheading and generally working, and the garden in June did not look like this.

Nothing I did made Saturday evening happen. The light came round to a different angle and did the whole job on its own.

What the sun is actually doing

It is worth knowing the mechanism, because it makes the thing more pleasing rather than less.

In June, at six in the evening, the sun is still high. Light comes down onto the garden from above, hits the tops of things, and bounces back at you off the surfaces. Everything is lit on the side you are looking at. It is bright, it is even, and it flattens the garden like a photograph taken with a flash.

By late September the sun is far lower at that hour, and two things follow.

The first is colour. Light coming in at a shallow angle travels through a great deal more atmosphere to reach you, and the atmosphere scatters the blue out of it along the way. What survives the journey is weighted towards red, orange and gold. That is the same process that makes a sunset, and in September you are not getting it for ten minutes at the end of the day; you are getting a version of it for the whole of the evening, because the sun is coming down at a shallower angle and takes its time about setting. The golden hour in June is barely an hour. Now it is most of the time you are out there.

The second is direction, and I think it matters more. The light is arriving sideways. It goes through things rather than onto them. A Karl Foerster at midday in July is a green smudge with a beige top; at six in September it is a column of light. Anything with a fine or translucent edge — grasses, fennel, spent umbels, the last of the verbena — turns into a lantern. And everything solid throws a long shadow across the ground beside it, which is what gives the garden depth it does not have at noon.

Sidelight shows structure. Overhead light hides it.

I have planted this garden for colour for ten years and I have never once planted it for light.

The gold was already in the leaf

The other half of it is the leaves themselves, and this is the part that turned the whole week over for me.

When a leaf goes yellow in autumn, we talk about it turning, as though it is making a new colour. Mostly it is not. The yellow and the amber were in the leaf all summer, in pigments called carotenoids, sitting there behind the chlorophyll doing quiet work. Green simply shouts louder. As the days shorten and the tree starts pulling its resources back into the wood for winter, the chlorophyll breaks down and is withdrawn, and what is left behind is what was underneath all along.

The leaf is not changing colour. It is being uncovered.

I will be honest about the exception, because there is one. The true reds and purples — the ones that stop the traffic — are anthocyanins, and those are genuinely manufactured in autumn, in the last weeks, as the leaf is closing down. That part is new. But the golds that are running through everything in Norfolk this week were present in June, when I was out there with a watering can, not seeing them.

So we have two things happening at once out there, and both of them are the same shape. A light that shows what was always in the structure. A leaf that reveals what the green was covering.

Nothing has been added to this garden since June. Quite a lot has been taken away.

Lit differently

I have been turning that over for three days now and I cannot make it stay in the garden.

We talk about the seasons of a life as though the thing that changes is us — that we become different people at twenty and forty and seventy, that something is added or lost. Some of that is true. But a good deal of what actually changes is the angle of the light we are standing in, and what that light happens to reveal.

Here is a small example and it is entirely mine. In my twenties I had a run of years I would have described at the time as wasted. Jobs that went nowhere in particular. A lot of learning things the slow way, by getting them wrong in front of people. I did not think well of myself in that period and I would not have pretended otherwise.

I think about those same years now, at forty-five, and they read completely differently. Not because I have decided to be generous with myself. Because from here I can see what they were building, and at the time I was too close and the light was too flat to see anything but the surface. Same facts. Same years. Different angle.

You cannot rush this. That is the part I want to be careful about, because the temptation is to turn it into an instruction, and it does not work as one. You cannot stand in June and see what September will show you. The light has to come round, and it comes round at its own pace, and no amount of wanting it moves the sun.

What you can do is remember, in a flat-lit season, that flat light is a condition and not a verdict.

And there is a sting in this, which I am not going to tidy away. The reason the light is gold is that the sun is leaving. That warmth on the hedge on Saturday evening was a by-product of the days getting shorter; we are being shown the garden beautifully because the year is ending. The gold and the going are the same event.

I find I do not mind that as much as I expected to. It is honest. It is also, if you think about the leaf, not the end of anything — the tree is not losing the colour, it is taking everything of value back down into itself and letting go of what it does not need to carry through the winter.

That seems like a decent way to head into October.

Planting for light, which I have never done

Practical, and specific, because there is a fortnight in the year when you can actually see this and it is now.

Go out at six and look west. Not to work — take a cup of tea and stand in three or four different places in the garden with the low sun in front of you rather than behind you. That is the whole exercise. You will find, as I did, that your garden has one or two spots where the evening light comes through at exactly the right height, and that you have probably planted nothing in them and never sit anywhere near them. Photograph it, because in February you will not believe it happened.

Put the fine-textured things between you and the sun. This is the one planting rule I have taken from all of this, and it reverses how I have always done it. The plants that glow are the ones light can pass through: grasses, fennel, the dried umbels of achillea and sedum, anything with a seedhead rather than a petal.

I have an accidental experiment in this, which is the only reason I trust it. The Karl Foersters are scattered through both back borders, planted for their shape and their habit of standing bolt upright when everything around them has gone over. Same variety, same clay, put in the same week. On Saturday evening, the ones between me and the sun were alight. The ones on the far side, with the sun behind me, were beige. Nothing wrong with them. Just beige.

The plant is identical. The position is everything. And autumn on clay is a good time to move or plant a grass while the soil is still warm, so this is a decision you can act on this month rather than filing away for spring.

Leave the seedheads standing. This follows from the same thing, and it is mostly an argument for doing less. The instinct is to cut everything down and make it neat before winter. But a cut-down border has nothing for the light to catch, and a standing one has five months of it, plus frost on the seedheads in January and small birds working through them in between. Cut back what is soggy, collapsed or diseased. Leave anything that still stands up on its own. The Karl Foersters will hold their shape through wind and snow and be the best thing in the garden in February; they come down in late winter, just before the new growth starts, and not a day sooner.

And move the seat. This is the least romantic item on the list and possibly the most useful. Wherever you put your bench or your chairs, you put them there in the summer, for a summer sun, and the sun is not there any more. Ours has been sat in shade at six o'clock for about three weeks and I had not thought to ask why we had stopped sitting out. Ten minutes and two people, and you get an extra hour of the best light of the year, for nothing.

The garden spent this month showing me it had things I did not know were there. All it wanted from me was to be stood in front of at the right hour.

The Light Does Work You Cannot Do. I have not planted, fed or watered anything worth mentioning this month, and the garden has never looked better than it did at ten past six on Saturday. Some of what we are proud of is our labour, and some of it arrives because we happened to be standing in the right place at the right hour. Both count. Only one of them is ours.

It Was Already in the Leaf. The gold running through everything this week was in those leaves all summer, hidden behind the green. What looks like transformation out there is mostly disclosure — a covering coming off something that was there the whole time. Before you decide you have changed, or that someone else has, consider that you might simply be seeing them at a better angle.

Flat Light Is a Condition, Not a Verdict. There are seasons that show you at your worst, and standing in one, you cannot tell the difference between bad light and bad ground. You do not get to hurry the sun round. But it does come round, and the same facts read differently from further along, and the reason this particular light is so beautiful is that everything it touches is on its way to somewhere it will be needed again.

Gary Stewart writes twice a week from a small garden and an allotment on Norfolk clay.

Mondays are for what the garden has already done. Thursdays are shorter, because the weekend is the point and the reading is not.

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

Written slowly, at the speed of the garden.