Barbara Cartland

 As September heralds the gentle passing of summer and has brought the Autumnal Equinox, our thoughts turn to Dame Barbara’s much-loved oak, planted at Camfield Place by Queen Elizabeth the First.

 Any day now, its leaves will magically turn from green to burnt ochre, copper and gold.

An image that no one can more beautifully and poignantly describe quite like John Keats in his ‘To Autumn’:

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