Welcome to As the Season Turns, the 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.

October is here, and I always think it can be a month of two very different parts.

We start off October, almost playing at autumn.

Oh, isn't it beautiful? The golden light and the colourful trees.

Oh, look, here's a cute little autumn mist.

We might toy with lighting a fire, even though it's really

not quite cold enough. All that sort of nonsense. But then, as October ticks on, it starts to get

properly cold and dark. The first frosts might even appear. And then right at the end of the

month, the clocks change, and darkness falls an

hour early, and it suddenly all feels a bit serious. The Anglo-Saxons called this month

winter fillet, a word composed of winter and full moon, and they thought that winter began

on October's full moon,

which this month falls on the 20th. So this

really is the moment to enjoy

autumn in all its glory

because winter is on its way.

Make the most

...