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September - The Quiet Turning

Writer: Amanda Lennon
Amanda Lennon
Sep 3
5 min read

Autumn is my favourite time of year and September is the quiet descent.

There’s something about September that always feels like a quiet turning point. Summer hasn’t quite left us yet. The garden is still producing, there are flowers still blooming and, on a good day, when it's not throwing it down with rain, there’s enough warmth in the afternoon to convince us that summer might hang around for a little longer. You just can't sit on the garden chairs, we've forgotten to take the cushions off and they're sopping wet!


You can feel autumn beginning to creep in around the edges at the end of August - the light starts to leave earlier in the evening and the sun stays in bed a little longer in the mornings.


And the mornings are cooler. There’s sometimes a little mist hanging over the fields first thing, crane flies (daddy-longlegs, if you're British) start to flick around in doorways, and the webs in the grass are visible because of the dew.


Autumn doesn’t arrive all at once at Chaos Cottage. It announces itself in hundreds of tiny ways (which include the spiders moving back in).



A change in the garden

The garden is usually the first place we notice it.

After months of planting, watering, tying in, feeding and wondering what on earth we’re going to do with yet another courgette, the emphasis begins to shift from growing to gathering.


The tomatoes are finally ripening faster than we can eat them (actually, this year we haven't had nearly as many as previously, but that's a different story). The beans are slowing down. Flowers are going to seed and the vegetable garden starts to look slightly less manicured – well, it’s never really manicured, but even less tidy – and considerably more lived-in.


But there’s something deeply satisfying about wandering back to the house with a basket containing whatever happens to be ready that day. It might be tomatoes, beans, courgettes, apples or a slightly eccentric mixture of all four. And then comes the question becomes:

What on earth are we going to do with all of it?

Which inevitably means the kitchen starts to take over.



The season of gathering

September is when jars begin appearing everywhere at Chaos Cottage. Jam, chutney, roasted tomatoes, pickles. Things preserved in oil or vinegar, or with sugar. Things destined for the freezer. And occasionally a jar whose contents we will probably have completely forgotten by February.


It isn't about pretending we're self-sufficient. We're not.

It's simply about making the most of what we've grown and trying not to waste it.

There is something wonderfully grounding about turning a glut of something from the garden into food that will still be sitting on the pantry shelf months later.


A little piece of summer saved for winter.


Should the media be correct about the upcoming food shortages and breakdown of civilisation - I have enough courgette cake in the freezer to keep us going for quite a while and there's still plenty of loaves of my faviourite apple cake to go yet. We'll be diabetic but still able to kill those zombies.


The cottage begins to change too

The change happens inside almost without thinking about it.


Throws begin finding their way back onto sofas. Lamps are switched on earlier. Books migrate towards chairs. The kettle seems to spend even less time cold than usual.


After months when the doors have been open and life has spilled out into the garden, the house slowly begins gathering everyone back in. And the kitchen floor begins demanding considerably more frequent cleaning given the five wet spaniels trapesing in and out and Mr in wellies.


Perhaps because we spend our working days surrounded by old things, autumn always seems particularly suited to them. Warm wood, old leather, faded paintings, dull brass, slightly battered books and furniture carrying the marks of all the lives it has already lived somehow look even better in softer autumn light.


It’s one of the things I love most about choosing vintage and antique pieces for a home. They don’t demand that everything around them is perfect.

Quite the opposite.

They seem happiest in houses where people actually live.



Slowing down doesn’t mean stopping

I think that’s what I love most about this particular change of season.


For nature, autumn is a change of pace. Every year I hope it might be the same for us – although, in reality, autumn tends to be one of our busiest times.

As summer ends, people start thinking about gathering at home again. Halloween, Bonfire Night, Christmas and all the other celebrations that come with the darker half of the year. It’s our busiest season for tables and chairs, beds and bedroom furniture – pieces for houses that are filling up with family and friends again.

So life at Chaos Cottage certainly doesn’t stop.


And, to be fair, summer here can feel relentless. Manic, even.

The garden needs watering. Something needs picking. Something else desperately needs deadheading. The grass grows at approximately six feet per hour (as long as there's not a hosepipe ban, obviously). And all of that happens alongside deliveries, collections, packing, photographing and listings.

Then September arrives and nature begins quietly taking quite a few things off the list.


Not everything keeps growing.

Not everything is productive all the time.

Some things are allowed to finish.

Some are allowed to rest (hopefully including us!)

Perhaps we could learn something from that.

We certainly need to.


We live in a world that seems increasingly determined that we should always be doing more, producing more, buying more and moving faster.

Nature operates rather differently.

It grows. It produces. It gathers. It rests.

Then it begins again.


There’s something rather reassuring about that rhythm.


So this year, I’m going to try to make more time to sit and be quiet. To read. To digitally detox – as much as that’s possible when you run an online business. To listen to vinyl and the radio. To chat. To make time for coffee with friends without simultaneously trying to tick something else off the list.

Not to stop doing things.

Just, perhaps, to stop feeling that every moment needs to be filled with them because, let's face it, it is definitely the time of snuggling up with five spaniels on the sofa under a pretty vintage throw (and on a cheap on to keep the sofa covers clean).


What autumn will look like at Chaos Cottage

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be leaning into the season rather than rushing through it on our way to Christmas.


There’ll be plenty happening in the garden as we gather the last of the summer crops, enjoy the jolliness of the dinner-plate dahlias while they defy the colder weather, and begin preparing for the colder months.


There will undoubtedly be more preserving, baking and experimenting with whatever we’ve grown far too much of. We're now entering the apple and pear period....


We’ll be sharing some of our favourite books for darker evenings, beautiful old pieces for homes that are beginning to feel cosy again, and plenty of the ordinary, everyday life that happens in between.


And, of course, there will be spaniels.

Muddy spaniels.

Wet spaniels.

Spaniels inexplicably carrying enormous sticks.

Autumn is very much their season.




For now, though, summer is still here. Just.

So we’re enjoying the last of the flowers, eating tomatoes straight from the garden and leaving the doors open whenever the weather allows.


But the throws are waiting.

The books are piling up.

The jars are filling the pantry.

And there’s something rather lovely about knowing that the next season is quietly making its way towards us.

The turning has begun.

A little chaos, a lot of heart.

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