Autumn harvest

It doesn't matter how many iPhones or iPods fill our lives when fall is in the air with that certain blush of pink in the morning sky and the dew that settles heavily on the landscape.

We inherently want only what nature gives us. It is the intrinsic squirrel in us that hoards the bits of good earth and brings them inside as if we will never see another summer.

Why we do it would make an intriguing thesis. Why, when we have elaborate dens already filled to the corners with everything we could possibly want to see us through the winter - the big-screen TV, a freezer full of food, the warm microfiber bedding.

Yet gathering comes to us as spontaneously as goose bumps. We have been collecting food and florals for our lairs since antiquity. And these ephemeral celebrations of nature today are similar to the way they have always been.

In the beginning, flowers were gathered for funerals. In early Egypt, daffodils graced the dinner table. The ancient Greeks introduced today's ubiquitous cornucopia of fruit.
Then the Renaissance period saw gathering of the good earth advance to stylish arrangements with violets, primroses, daisies and dianthus. But gathering wasn't considered art until the 17th century, when the Dutch got their hands on it, introducing discipline, symmetry and the Scurve (also known as the line of beauty in floral arrangement), then immortalizing those ideas in oil paintings.

Of course, China and Japan had been at it all along, but we wouldn't know about Rikkwa - a branch of Ikebana - until after World War I.

In the 1920s, British society florist Constance Spry practically invented the modern-day pastime of "doing the flowers," an occupation that until then, was relegated to the help, not the homeowner.

But most of us just browse our back yard or local park, like the good old days of the early Egyptians, for what we like to look at. This fall, don't overlook a single possibility. Everything is game as far as nature's bounty goes: fruit trees, ornamental trees, the vegetable garden, the flower garden, ornamental grasses, twigs and twisted branches.

SOURCES
>> "The Power of Plants," by Brendan Lehane (McGraw-Hill)
>> "The New Emily Post's Etiquette," by Elizabeth L. Post (Fund & Wagnalls)
>> www.constancespry.com