Up The Garden Path…

Is this Autumn? Is it the dry weather? Is it an aeroplane?

Slowly but surely over the past week or two, the layer of yellow leaves has progressively been thickening in places throughout the garden, especially along the Secret Garden pathway, as captured in the photo above.

Humankind, especially the British leg of humankind, has always been pre-occupied with pigeon-holing and naming stuff. Like, for example, the four seasons, and what each season is supposed to do.

In New Zealand, we know that all the Autumn things must happen during March, April and May. Therefore,the trees have got it all wrong around our area – they evidently didn’t get the email about leaf-dropping not being permitted during the last month of Summer… someone may be in for the chop…  

I have tried in vain to check up on plausible reasons for this delinquent behaviour, and what might be done about it to avoid a recurrence. If I may be permitted,I would like to share with my readers the following from Ali Bell*¹:

“…On the first of March something strange happens – television news reporters inform the citizens of Aotearoa/New Zealand it's the first day of autumn. A significant proportion of those hearing this news live in Auckland and Northland. Folk begin to exclaim the new weather conditions and friends send emails overseas telling of the dawning of a new season. The trouble is – it's in all probability a nonsense of enormous Eurocentric postcolonial proportions…”

“…If you think it is the first day of autumn on the first of March, you are being sorely deceived, and perpetuating a fiction generated by homesick northern European colonials, having brought their trout and oak trees among many other reminders of Britain. This fiction gets further supported by the embarrassingly stupid and immature-nation epithet that New Zealand is more English than England, most recently broadcast to the world unfortunately, by Prime Minister John Key on The Late Show with David Letterman, that New Zealand ‘is like England’ (‘without the attitude’)…”

“…The answer at its most simple is a bunch of European dudes got together in 1780 and decided that the year should be divided into four seasons of equal three-month length. This is a true state for continental central and northern Europe where there is a much greater temperature range than on our place on the planet. Quite simply, the news reporters say it's autumn because the calendar tells them so…”

*¹   Ali Bell is a freelance teacher, writer, editor and journalism graduate from AUT University. She divides her time between Sweden and Auckland – not being able to convince her grown-up half-Swedish children to leave the magical 21 degrees celsius of Auckland.

AUT is Auckland University of Technology (in Maori: Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau)