Season of soul.

taking cues from autumn as we approach the equinox.

I’m Lyndsay, mother, creative and storyteller with a background in interiors PR. Story & Thread. is a weekly letter exploring the intersection of creativity, mothering and the living world, with a home and a garden at the heart...

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“Autumn is my season, dear. It is, after all, the season of the soul.” — Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Violet Dickinson written c. July 1907.

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Hi everyone…

Autumn has arrived in earnest here in North London — waking up to a dark and heavy rain-laden sky, I turned on the light in the bathroom this morning for the first time since early spring. I swapped my Birkenstocks for wellies, and coats were pulled on (well on some of us anyway, what is it with toddlers and their strong convictions against coats…?).

The pavement outside our front door is scattered with crunchy leaves that my daughter imagines are crumpled fragments of treasure maps…and we are finding our way back to a season that feels like home.

I hope you are staying warm and dry as we move into the darker (but cosier) part of the year in this corner of the world…

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An autumn palette.

As autumn truly sets in, our days have been enriched with both familiarity and wonder — at the exemplary acorns and lustrous conkers paving the way as we walk; at spiderwebs decorated in raindrops and the most dreamy dose of dahlias…

Capturing the dahlias in our entrance hall.

Last week we visited a flower cutting patch in the garden centre local to where I grew up, and despite it being a gorgeous September day, I felt the shift from the lightness of spring and the brightness of summer, into the burnished bronze of autumn.

I found myself being drawn to dahlias with petals in antique shades like ripening apricot, peach and plum, to jewel-like tones of cherry and pomegranate, as deep as blackberry; softened with a dollop of creamy hues. I was astounded by the variety of floral forms, from tightly packed petals arranged into neat mandalas, to large wild blooms spilling open like stars.

All the different dahlias.

The autumn equinox.

This feeling of fading, ripening and mellowing is steered by the angle of the light, governed by the planetary shift as we approach the autumn equinox on Saturday — the moment when the sun is directly over the equator and the amount of light is (almost) equal everywhere on earth¹.