Quickly, dramatically the changes pass over the countryside at harvest time. One day, and the great shoulder of land across the narrow valley is gracious with the billowing of silver barley; the very next, with passing combine and baler, and the evening sun goes down upon the shaven stubble. Another twenty-four hours and the fangs of the five-furrow plough pass over, the stubble is inturned and the land striped brown against the autumn sowing.

Dramatic, the changing panoramas of harvest time, with the honey-breath of the purple clover fields blowing across the soldierly stooked wheat at sunset; speedwell, pimpernel, yarrow and mustard yellow ragwort in the sunken road; the peace of the millstream by the river’s edge where the young swallows flitter in the evening sunlight. The sunlight of the shortening days; for shortening they very clearly are when the lights are on behind closed curtains soon after half-past eight, and the village children, who seemed summerlong to have perched like sparrows upon the bridge over the brook far into the night, are suddenly gathered up and gone at this oddly sudden early hour.

The month of August, still chattering with harvest coming home, draws towards its close and the full beauty of the stubble appears in the short phase before the onslaught of the plough, with its small earthy flowers - blue of the true cornflower, scarlet of the pinpoint pimpernel, small clusters of heartsease, and always about the borders of the harvested acres the gold of the toadflax, frog mouthed in the sun, and the blunt petals of blue chicory, startling in their sudden revelation behind the cut curtains of the corn. The spider spins from stalk to stubbly stalk, and in the orchard the plump fruit hangs, awaiting its fulfilment in the warm September sun.

“Now by the hedgerows and along the lane The berried cuckoo-pint and yellow vetch Herald the autumn, and the squirrels rob Windfalls of hazel and the Kentish cob, (Plumping their kernels white as children’s teeth) With acorns, provender for the winter drey, That little larder, safely tucked beneath Leaves, roots, old tree-stumps, for a milder day Of winter, when the sleeping muscles stretch And there’s a stirring in the sodden wood As woken squirrel reaches after food.”

The Land,Vita Sackville-West 1926