‘‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’’ Keats said but it was the next line ‘‘Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun’’ which we enjoyed sniggering over as schoolboys — ‘‘bosom’’ being as close as we got to pornography in those days.
Autumn is with us now and in Central Otago, where each season is clearly defined, it offers its own package of natural delights.
There is still some of summer’s warmth in the air while the first frosts — just a touch of crispness, really — are beginning and there’s been a morning when snow lingered on the Rock and Pillars for an hour or two. It’s a kind of a hardening us up for winter, I guess.
It’s one of my favourites — Wiliam Butler Yeats’ When You Are Old, which begins:
"When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look.
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;"
Overall, the poets are divided on autumn with their opinions ranging from John Donne’s ‘‘No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face,’’ to A.E. Houseman’s:
"Give me a land of boughs in leaf
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen there is grief;
I love no leafless land.’"
Yes, ‘‘leafless land’’ has a touch of melancholy but in autumn some trees turn on a display of gold before their leaves, um, leave.
No tree does it better than the poplar and where I live the poplars have made autumn the best of seasons.
In colonial times the poplar was planted widely and many Otago homesteads were surrounded by poplars.
The poplars were often shelter for fruit trees, as at Feraud’s Monte Christo orchard in Clyde in the 1860s. By the 1880s most towns were planting poplars on a large scale, with Cromwell to the fore in 1884 when the water supply was established and the town ‘‘assumed quite a green appearance, through the plantation of a large number of poplar trees.’’
In the treeless Strath Taieri in 1887 Gladbrook Station’s tree nursery had hundred of surplus poplars to give away and the Middlemarch schoolmaster’s house and many other properties thus scored a free shelter belt.
Poplars became widely used as ‘‘living’’ fence posts, and in 1897 the Cardrona School planted poplars which would later have crossbars attached ‘‘to make a splendid permanent double swing for the children, without any fear of a collapse, as was the case with the merry-go-round last year!’’
All the while the goldminers of Patearoa, many now also farming on a small scale, had been planting poplars and almost every description of the Otago landscape mentioned the poplar. Patearoa’s most famous poet David McKee Wright certainly did:
"Summer In Central Otago.
Warm summer sleeps around me, droning bees
Suck the dry flowers, and not a whispering breeze
Moves in the languid, dusty poplar trees."
Poplars were signposts, and on the Maniototo plain gave promise of a welcome resting place.
In 1898 a traveller, after hours on horseback, spied poplars in the distance.
When he reached them he found it was the site of the old Blackball Hotel on the Dunstan Rd and he was well supplied with food and drink and early goldrush stories.
Those poplars with their golden curtain of foliage, now fading, have greeted me each day lately and an Otago Witness report from Clyde in 1903 proves nothing has changed.
‘‘The Lombardy poplar trees look really handsome in their warm golden autumnal vesture, and add a splendour to the landscape which too soon, alas, must feel the cold and unsympathetic winds, before which so much of the glory of nature must fade into nothingness.’’
Ignore his pessimism: the winter wonder of Central Otago is almost upon us.
