October 18: I know that once in May I chose those days of spring as the finest of the year. And I may think so again when I am in the midst of another spring. But now it seems to me it is these few lingering days of October that must be the finest of all. In them, as in the days of spring, there is beauty, sunshine, genial conditions. But here there is an added quality, a sense of maturity, of having experienced more, a greater sense of knowing, a sense of ripening, of fulfillment, of acceptance.

from “A Walk through the Year”, where Teale chronicled our natural world; I would feel remiss in not sharing his brilliance with my humble reflections on this, our most brilliant of seasons.

The season of autumn is our most robust. Spring tiptoes in gently, unfurling itself in the gauzy haze of the awakening swamp, in the pearly buds of pussy willows. Summer lazily rolls in with its sweltering temperatures, winter sweeps in with snowflakes. Autumn gives us only a few whispers of its approach — in tasseling grasses and sprouting toad stools, in dewy spider webs — before trumpeting its presence, bursting forth by igniting the trees, sprinkling fields with flowers and insects, crisping the air. “A time rich in beauty,” Teale wrote, “before a time of bleakness.”

New England’s foliage is legendary, with people traveling miles and from around the world to witness what surrounds us, the autumnal equinox a brilliant bridge we cross, first signaled with the startling flash of Virginia creeper racing around trunks of trees still saturated with summer’s green. This is the first of the series of flames Teale called the “annual pageant of the autumn foliage”: the flickering yellow of birches, the chartreuse fountain of willows, sourwood’s crimson pendants, purpling dogwoods, coppery pyramids of pears, the rust and bronze of oaks, maples — the enormous Norways providing golden domes in our yards, the ornamental Japanese that abruptly sparks and drops as suddenly, leaving a scarlet ring around its circumference, and our own natives — the bright red swamp maples and the bright orange sugars embroidering the hills and valleys that beckon visitors, and beckon us to collect samples of leaves that appear to have been painted with the tiny brushes of autumn elves.

The fields where the “great employment of the plants,” Teale explained, “is the spreading and perpetuation of the species”, host mellower colors with their wildflowers: pale tapestries of lavender thistle fluff and violet ladies’ tresses, or royal robes of mauve Joe Pye weed and golden rod. Asters, the delicate mist of palest blues and lavenders, deeper violets and wines, those with raspberry centers flushing their tiny white petals palest pink, billowy clouds of cream-colored flowers with honey-toned centers, veils of those with miniscule white petals circling yellow centers, those with tawny, wind-swept petals. All of these I allow, actually encourage, coax, into my gardens where they complement fall’s perennials.

In the garden, rudbeckia lingers well into the fall, bushels of golden rays which speak so harmoniously to the season as they wither. Sunflowers also extend their season, the sunny disks that attract butterflies and bees developing into thousands of seeds for the chickadees. Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ offers its metamorphosis for months, their umbels the pale pink and green of carnival glass aging to purplish pink, bright raspberry, dark cranberry, and finally their winter rust. Clusters of mauve “amphibians” climb along turtlehead’s stiff stalks, and boltonia becomes smothered with the multitude of miniscule white daisies monarchs favor. Cascading branches of New England asters, the purple ‘Hella Lacy’, raspberry ‘Alma Poetske’ and the paler ‘Harrington’s Pink’ swap seeds to produce flowers of violet, lavender, wine, plum, grape, magenta, fuschia and rose. Last to flower, chrysanthemums; though my garden can always rely on one golden variety, a cream, a mauve, and the sparkling Montauk daisy, mums are always worth the annual purchase for the autumn hues which reflect those of the harvest and the foliage.

Ornamental grasses come into their own in autumn with bristled spikes, ivory fronds, purplish plumes, and feathery shafts the color of wheat waving over blades of blue and silver, green striped gold and white, and those which turn the colors of fall foliage, fountains of yellow and orange and red. And there are the berries. In the garden, viburnum’s lustrous fruits, clusters of dark blue, rose pink, scarlet, ivory and cherry-red, ripen as its foliage turns burgundy, gold, orange and crimson. And in the wild, there are the ruby chokecherries, the garnet beads of barberry, bittersweet’s yellow capsules opening to vermillion seeds, and the black inkberry, a single plant Teale estimated “supplying more than 25,000 large, plump, juicy berries for the migrating birds to consume.”

Fall is not only visually vibrant. There are the vegetables brimming in the garden, the flavors of apples and pumpkin spice, the feel of the closing light, the incomparable brush of Indian summer, the wind that ushers in winter. And the seasonal sounds. The morning birds, their songs rousing us at the sun’s first emergence, afternoons of blackbirds scavenging the fields in synchronized flights, arrows of departing geese sounding the alarm, the nighttime orchestra of insects measuring the progression of the season as it swells, then slows, the symphony that envelopes us nightly “filled with gentle melancholy,” Teale wrote, “that each year seems to me, more than any other, the voice of summer’s ending.”

There are quiet, gentler notes that Teale so famously noticed, “a thimbleful dipped from the wide lake of occurrences transpiring unobserved around us.” A chrysalis splitting open, the first flight of a butterfly, the rapid darts of slender dragonflies. The mist rising on the pond mornings, golden leaves freckling the black water of the brook. The mellower slant of light, the sharpness of the stars, the harvest moon. The rattle of dried corn in the fields, the dance of the wild wheat, the whisper of milkweed silk, the ballet of falling leaves…

…and the scents. The unforgettable tang of Concord grapes encountered on a woodland hike. The aroma of ripe apples in the orchard. The mustiness of fallen leaves as we shuffle through their brittleness, a scent as singular as leaf mold mingling with soil in early spring. The smoke of the hearth, “where the first small fire of the year is blazing”, alerting us to the tendrils dispersing into the dusk. At no time throughout the rest of these seasons will smoke rising from the chimney welcome us quite this way, with this comforting scent of warmth. From here to April, the scent of the smoldering incense of chimney smoke is the norm, what penetrates the air in and around the house, the indiscernible. It is only this first that wakens us to the purest comforts of home.

Dayna McDermott Arriola