Welcome to As the Season Turns, a podcast following each month of the year.

As the hedgerows change, the full moons come and go, and nature takes its course in the garden.

I'm Leila Lander as a nature writer and author of The Almanac, a seasonal guide.

This podcast is brought to you by Fern, makers of small batch organic natural perfume,

who blend, barrel age and bottle four fragrances a year, released at the equinoxes and solstices.

We hope that this brief guide to what to look for in the month ahead will awaken you to the rhythms of the year and help you, in the words of the poet Ray Carver, settle deeper into the seasons.

After all the excitement of May and June, that thrill of summer is really here, July always feels to me like a much more relaxed month. Yes, we've arrived, chill out. It's a bit like that in the natural world, certainly. All that frenzy of parading about, marking territories, pairing up and mating, or creating great clouds of sexy, tempting

blossom to be pollinated and turned into fruits, well, most of that is done. It's time for nature to start messing about and get on with the serious grown-up stuff

of the year, of growing, tending and nurturing.

A funny thing about July is that there are very few traditional seasonal celebrations,

and I think that is simply because in an agricultural society everyone was just too busy to take time off to lark about.

Like the birds and the bees, we had to get down to business this month, making sure the early work of sewing and propagating turned into produce to see us through winter.

But now? Now, I think July is a month when we sink into summer.

It feels right.

The temperature is nice.

Everything looks pretty.

The living, for those of us that aren't directly involved in haymaking and the like, is easy.

It could be like this all year and we would be happy. A gentle, easygoing kind of a

month. Lovely July. The naming of July. Yukhar in Scots Gallic, Julie in Scots and Alster Scots, Yul in Irish Calic, Jerry Saury in Manx,

Gorthen in Welsh, Gotherin in Cornish, and Juehé in Geria.

Julius Caesar named July Julius after himself in 46 BC as a pat on the back for reforming

the Roman calendar and creating the, you guessed it, Julian calendar.

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