The first signs of fall have already made themselves noticed in the garden. The smells were first to change, the perfumes sweeter and heavier. Next will be the colors as they turn to the reliable shades of crimson, saffron, orange, and scarlet. There’s something more serious about the fall than any other season. Maybe it’s the light that gradually grows darker, making everything seem less trivial, forcing you to look harder to find your way.

Gail Tsukiyama, from The Samurai’s Garden

EPHEMERIS FOR THE FINAL WEEK OF LATE SUMMER
The Hummingbird Flocking Moon enters its final quarter on September 11 at 9:16 p.m.  Dark and waning through the week ahead, it becomes the new Jerusalem Artichoke Moon on the 18th.

Venus is still the morning star this week, bright in the east  before dawn. Jupiter is the most prominent planet of the evening, high in the west after sundown.

SEASONAL TOPOGRAPHY
The temporal countryside of along the 40th Parallel takes on its autumnal contours from the increasingly violent movements of the Earth’s atmosphere as it tilts away from the sun.

Graphs of barometric pressure reveal many of the topographical patterns of the season. August's barometric configurations are slow and gentle like low, rolling dunes. Heat waves show up as wide plateaus. Thunderstorms are sharp, shallow troughs in the mellow waves of the atmospheric landscape.

At the close of Late Summer, the year has begun its ascent to the steep cliffs of December. By the beginning of October, the barometric waves are stronger; the high-pressure peaks become taller; the lows are deeper, with almost every valley bringing rain.

Tapering floral sequences and the gradual surge of leafturn occur amid the diminishing expanse of middle September. From the broad lowland of warmth with its six months of birdsong and its hundred days of insect calls, the sun pulls the land up into the foothills of the year where asters and goldenrod bloom and where trees are gold and red.

Middle Fall is the rough piedmont of another country, stripping foliage, putting buds into dormancy, burning away the undergrowth and revealing the dark hillsides. At the end of Late Fall, December’s great range of cold and snow fills the horizon. Beyond it lies another immense upland, the frigid, high plateau of Deep Winter in which nothing ever seems to grow or change until the ground crumbles and gives way, shattered by thaws, and time tumbles down into the sudden, stormy gorge of March.