This Sarreguemines set of 3 plates and lidded pot seem an ideal way to serve a Ploughman’s lunch of bread, cheese, fruit and pickles. What a great way to welcome Autumn.

These plates are French but a “Ploughman’s Lunch” was a marketing ploy by the British Milk Marketing Board to get the public to eat more cheese after wartime rationing. It certainly worked in my house!

Meteorologically Autumn runs from September to the end of November but it’s often said to start with the Autumn equinox around 23rd September this year (2023).

Ode to Autumn is one of my favourite poems. Written by John Keats, a “Romantic” British poet who lived over 200 years ago from 1795 to 1821.

Keats celebrates the energy, beauty and abundance of the season rather than the death of Summer. It uses beautiful imagery to describe the flora and fauna commonly associated with this time of year.

Ode To Autumn by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.