The 10 things we love most about Autumn

Don't be downhearted by the shortening days and cold weather – there are lots of great reasons to love Autumn. Here are our favourites.

Dew on cobwebs at sunrise
(Image credit: Alamy)

Summer and winter are all well and good, but it’s Spring and Autumn that have always got the poets and philosophers in a spin. And particularly Autumn, which Albert Camus called ‘a second spring when every leaf is a flower.’

He wasn’t the only one to wax lyrical about the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (Keats) or revel in ‘the year’s last, loveliest smile’ (New York Post editor William Cullen Bryant).

Even the return of a chill in the air has inspired our greats to mention that ‘bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins’ (P. G. Wodehouse).

And some have gone even further: ‘No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace/As I have seen in one autumnal face’ wrote John Donne, while Samuel Butler delighted in the fact that ‘what we lose in flowers, we more than gain in fruits’

Are they putting a brave face on things? Not a bit of it. Take a look at our Autumnal list of reasons to be cheerful and you’ll feel every bit as inspired by the new season as the great men of letters above.

Top 10 things we all love about Autumn

  1. Honking geese in ‘Red Arrows’ formation

https://youtu.be/qEVpJK7pEPE?t=54s

  1. Making crumbles

crumble recipes

Country Life's Top 5 Crumble recipes
(Image credit: (c) Peterotoole | Dreamstime.com)
  1. Fires

Country Life's Top 10 log burners
  1. Leaves. So many leaves.

Best places in Britain to see Autumn leaves
  1. Hearty soups and casseroles

Country Life’s favourite autumnal recipes
  1. Murmurations of starlings

  1. Conkers

conkers

Sunlit conkers
(Image credit: Getty Images/Moment Open)
  1. Having the beach to yourself

  1. Cobwebs covered in dew. At sunrise.

Dew on cobwebs at sunrise

(Image credit: Alamy)
  1. Putting away the lawnmower for the rest of the year


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