September Prompts: How To Use Cosy Prompts for Early Autumn

The Calendar Year may get paid commission for purchases made after clicking a link on this page. 
This website is for inspiration purposes only. The content provided is meant to spark creativity and ideas, not to serve as professional advice or as endorsement.

Something happens in September that is hard to pinpoint exactly. It’s not one thing. It’s a whole constellation of things arriving more or less simultaneously. The light changes. The air changes. The smell changes. The hedgerows are suddenly heavy with fruit and berries. The mornings have a coolness in them that wasn’t there in August.

And then one day, you look at a tree, and it has turned. Not all of it. Maybe just the top, or one side facing the prevailing wind. But the colour is there. Amber and gold and rust where there was green. And you know, with complete certainty, that the year has turned.

I find September one of the most emotionally powerful months of the year. There is something in the combination of beauty and loss that is almost overwhelming if you let it be. The colours are extraordinary. The light is extraordinary. And it is all, unmistakably, on its way out.

This is the ninth post in a year-long series about noticing the changing seasons. We’ve been building towards this moment since January. The wheel has turned all the way round, and now we are watching it begin to close.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

The autumn equinox falls on or around the 22nd or 23rd of September. This is the mirror of the spring equinox in March. Day and night are equal again, briefly. After this, the nights are longer than the days and will continue to lengthen until the winter solstice in December.

The pace of change accelerates in September, echoing March. Just as spring arrived fast, autumn moves quickly once it gets going. A tree can go from green to full autumn colour and bare branches in the space of three weeks if the conditions are right.

What triggers the colour change is a combination of shortening days and cooling temperatures. As the days shorten, trees begin to withdraw the green chlorophyll from their leaves in preparation for dropping them. As the chlorophyll breaks down, the other pigments that were there all along, the yellows and oranges, become visible. The reds and purples are produced freshly by the tree as it withdraws sugars from the leaves. This is why autumn colours are better in some years than others. A warm, sunny September followed by cool nights produces the best reds. A wet, warm autumn produces more muted yellows and browns.

In the US, the fall foliage season is one of the year’s great natural spectacles. New England is famous for it, but colour changes happen across the whole country at different times. The Smoky Mountains fall foliage map tracks colour changes across the US in real time. For the UK, the Woodland Trust’s autumn colour guide is a lovely resource.

The hedgerows are at their absolute peak of fruiting. Blackberries, elderberries, hawthorn berries, rosehips, sloes, crab apples, and rowans are all either ripe or ripening. This abundance is not accidental. It evolved to coincide with the period when birds and mammals are building up fat reserves for winter. The hedgerow and the animals that eat it are in a beautiful, ancient, mutually beneficial relationship.

Migration is in full swing. Billions of birds are moving across the northern hemisphere in September. In coastal areas and on high ground, visible migration can be spectacular on clear days with a northerly wind. The US, hawk watching sites like Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania see thousands of raptors passing through in September and October. In the UK, sites such as Spurn Point in Yorkshire and Portland Bill in Dorset see large movements of small birds.

Nature Journalling: Tracking the Colour Change

September is the month to document the colour change in real time. The colours move through the landscape in a particular sequence and at a particular pace, and tracking that in a journal is one of the most satisfying seasonal records you can make.

Different tree species turn at different times and in different colours. Horse chestnuts are often among the first, their leaves going a rich rusty brown from late August. Cherries turn vivid red and orange in September. Beeches hold their green longer than many trees and then turn a luminous copper-gold. Oaks are usually last, still green when everything around them has changed.

The colour is also affected by position. The top of a tree turns before the lower branches. North-facing slopes turn before south-facing ones. Trees on the edge of a wood turn before those in the interior.

Prompt: Find a tree that is beginning to turn and visit it every week throughout September. Each time you visit, write a description of where it is in the process. What proportion of the leaves have turned? What colour are they exactly? Have any fallen yet? Sketch the overall shape of the tree and use colour if you can, even just with coloured pencils, to record where the colour has reached. By the end of September, you’ll have a four-part record of one tree’s autumn.

For recording your observations as part of citizen science, the Woodland Trust Nature’s Calendar specifically tracks autumn colour and the timing of leaf fall across the UK. Your observations genuinely contribute to long-term phenological data.

Poetry: Keats Again, and the Elegy

We talked about Keats’ To Autumn in August as the poem of the turning season. In September, it becomes even more relevant. Read it again now that the season it describes is actually here.

The elegy is the poetic form most associated with autumn. An elegy is a poem of mourning, traditionally for a person, but the form extends naturally to the mourning of a season, a time of year, a way of things being. The autumn elegy is one of the oldest and most persistent forms in poetry across cultures.

Rilke wrote about autumn with a weight and tenderness that are very different from those of the English pastoral tradition. His Autumn Day, written in Paris in 1902, is one of the great autumn poems in any language and is worth finding in a good translation. The opening lines, about commanding the last fruits to ripen and the last warm days to linger, feel very September.

In the American tradition, Robert Frost’s autumn poems have a quality of acceptance mixed with something darker beneath the surface. His poem After Apple-Picking is set in exactly this season and rewards close reading.

The Welsh tradition has a concept called hiraeth, which roughly translates as a longing for something lost or something that may never have existed. It’s related to nostalgia but deeper and more melancholy. September, with its beauty and its passing, seems to call hiraeth out of people in a particular way.

Prompt: Write an elegy for something from this year that is now over. It could be the summer just ending. A particular place you visited that felt perfect. A feeling you had in May or June that you know won’t come back until next year. Try to write about it with love rather than bitterness. Let the autumn landscape around you be present in the poem as well.

The Poetry Foundation’s collection of autumn poems is worth browsing before and after writing your own.

Photography: Autumn Colour and Mist

September and October are probably the most photographed months of the year for landscapes. The colours are extraordinary. The light is excellent. The misty mornings add atmosphere.

The classic autumn photograph is a woodland floor covered in fallen leaves, or a tree in full colour reflected in still water. These are classics because they work. But they are also everywhere, and if you want to make something more distinctive, it helps to think about what makes your particular September in your particular place look the way it does.

Mist is one of September’s great photographic gifts. Valley mist in the early morning, with tree tops emerging above it like islands, is a reliable and wonderful subject. To photograph it, you need to be up early, before about eight in the morning, and positioned above the level of the mist, looking down or across it.

Side lighting is as good in September as it is in any month. The sun is low enough that even midday light has some angle to it. The warm amber quality of September sunlight through turning leaves, particularly backlit leaves with the sun coming through them, produces images with a warmth and richness that are very difficult to achieve at other times of year.

Prompt: Get up early on a misty September morning and go somewhere with a view, ideally looking down over a valley or a river. Photograph the mist. Try different compositions: wide shots that take in the whole misty landscape, and tighter shots that focus on one detail emerging from the mist, a tree, a fence post, a church spire. Also, try photographing in the opposite direction, towards the low sun, and see what the backlit mist does to the light quality.

For autumn landscape photography, specifically, the photographer Charlie Waite has been photographing the British autumn landscape for decades, and his approach to composition and light is instructive and beautiful.

Short Story: The Harvest and What Comes After

September is harvest time in the fullest sense. The grain harvest is complete. The hedgerow harvest is at its peak. Apple orchards are being picked. There is an ancient quality to September that connects it to the deepest human experiences of the agricultural year: abundance, effort, and the looming knowledge of winter.

The harvest festival is one of humanity’s oldest rituals, found in some form in virtually every agricultural culture. The relief and gratitude of a successful harvest, the anxiety about whether there will be enough, and the community coming together to bring it in. These are very old feelings that September still contains, even now, even in cities, as an emotional undertow.

Thomas Hardy set several of his most powerful scenes in the harvest field. The reaping scene in Tess of the d’Urbervilles is intense and beautiful, and worth reading specifically in September. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss has a similar quality of landscape and season, carrying emotional weight.

Prompt: Write a story of no more than 900 words set at a harvest of some kind. It doesn’t have to be an agricultural harvest. It could be the harvest of a garden allotment. Someone is picking the last of the tomatoes before the first frost. A family gathering apples from a tree in a suburban garden. What is being gathered, and what is the character aware of losing or holding onto as they gather it?

Drawing: Autumn Leaves and the Colour Palette

Fallen leaves are one of the great drawing subjects of the year, and September is when they begin to arrive. The variety of form, colour, and texture in autumn leaves is remarkable. An oak leaf is completely different from a beech leaf, which is different again from a maple or a horse chestnut.

September is the time to build a small collection of leaves pressed between the pages of a heavy book. Gather them fresh and press them immediately. After a week or two, they will be flat, dry, and perfect for drawing from. Leaves that dry without pressing tend to curl and distort in interesting but difficult ways.

Colour mixing is the real challenge and pleasure of drawing autumn leaves. The colours in a single leaf are rarely pure yellow or pure red. They are complex mixtures that shift from one part of the leaf to another. A beech leaf might go from pale green at the base through yellow and amber to deep rust at the edges, all on a single leaf. Capturing that requires patience and a willingness to look very carefully at what is actually there rather than what you expect to see.

Prompt: Collect five different autumn leaves from five different tree species. Press them if you want to draw them later, or draw them fresh while they still have some suppleness. For each leaf, try to identify at least four distinct colours within it before you start. Then draw it, focusing on getting those specific colour transitions right rather than the overall shape. The shape of a leaf is interesting. The colour is extraordinary.

For colour-mixing guidance specifically for botanical illustration, Billy Showell’s books and online courses are excellent. Her approach to mixing the complex, nuanced colours found in nature is practical and very applicable to autumn leaves.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: Apples, Blackberries, Sloes, and the Hedgerow Harvest

September is the beginning of the apple season in earnest. Early varieties have been around since August, but September brings the great eating and cooking apples into their prime. Cox’s Orange Pippin, which is one of the finest eating apples ever developed, is at its best in September and October. Bramley cooking apples are transformative when cooked down with a little sugar and butter.

Sloes, the small dark blue-black berries of the blackthorn, are beginning to ripen in September. They are extremely astringent when eaten raw, but infused into gin or vodka with sugar over several months, they make one of the great homemade drinks of the British hedgerow. Sloe gin made in September or October is traditionally ready for Christmas. The BBC Good Food sloe gin recipe is reliable and simple.

Elderberries are ripe and available for a brief window in September. They should not be eaten raw, but cooked elderberries make an excellent cordial that has genuine cold-fighting properties. The Hedgerow Medicine website by Julie Bruton-Seal and Matthew Seal has excellent guidance on the medicinal and culinary uses of hedgerow plants.

In the US, September brings the apple harvest across the Northeast and Midwest. Apple picking is one of the great September activities. Wild nuts, particularly black walnuts and hickory nuts, are beginning to fall in woodland areas.

Recipe prompt: Make an apple and blackberry crumble or an apple cake. These two ingredients overlap for only a few weeks each year, and they belong together completely. Use the most local apples you can find. If you can, pick your own blackberries. The crumble topping is better with some oats and a little ground ginger or cinnamon. Eat it while it is still warm enough to melt a generous spoonful of clotted cream or good vanilla ice cream.

Alternatively, make a start on sloe gin if you can find sloes. You’ll be thanking yourself at Christmas.

One Last Thing

There’s a particular quality to September light in the late afternoon. It comes in low and amber, making everything look significant. A gate. A muddy path. A single red leaf on the ground. The ordinary things of an ordinary afternoon look, in that light, like they mean something.

I think this is part of what September does. It reminds you to pay attention because things are going on. The year has been generous, long, and full of incident. Now it is beginning to close.

But closing is not the same as ending. The wheel is turning. The colour is arriving. The hedgerows are full of fruit. September is not a sad month. It is a rich one.

Pay attention to it while it is here. The colours will be gone before you’ve had enough of them.

I’ll be back in October, when autumn is fully, unmistakably present and the year begins its final turn towards winter.

Previously: August. Next month: October and the deep heart of autumn.