October

Lia Leendertz (0:06)

Welcome to the 2026 edition of the award-winning Ffern podcast As the Season Turns. Released on the first of each month, the episodes follow the changing landscape of the seasons, from the moon and the stars to the tides and the trees. I'm Lia Leendertz, author of The Almanac, a seasonal guide, and this podcast is a collaboration between myself and Ffern, makers of small batch seasonal perfume.

October is when autumn really settles into itself. Misty mornings, moonlit nights. I've been getting into the spirit with Ffern's new Autumn 26 fragrance, a silvery, shimmery scent, inspired by the full moon rising over a heather maw. It really does smell like heather and rich peat, with a smudgy feeling that reminds me of moonbeams or twilight. It's not too late to sign up for a bottle of autumn. Do visit www.fern.co to find out more and join the waiting list.

For October, we're amid grass-spiked sand dunes, where small birds scrap over autumn berries. Late bees search for nectar ahead of winter. A rare toad crouches amid the roses in sea buckthorn, and the wind whistles, carrying songs of mermaids in from the sea. In the water, flounders flip and shimmy through the shallows, while in the sky above we see the trail of a great comet. We hope that this brief guide to the month ahead will awaken you to the rhythms of the year and help you to settle deeper into the seasons.

The autumn wind has real heft to it on the path behind the dunes, shouldering in off the sea, carrying waves of the scent of salt that mingle with the coconut warmth of the gorse still in flower. A wren, invisible deep down in the blackthorn scrub, fills the blustering air with song, easily competing with the gusts, while a blackbird takes shelter down among the leaf litter, picking through it, flicking leaves aside. The late afternoon sun appears and disappears behind a broken procession of cloud, sometimes hiding the temperature plummeting, sometimes flooding the gorse gold for a minute at a time. The scrub gives way to the dunes proper, where the marron grass leans hard in long combed ranks, hissing in the wind. Burnet rose sprawls low across the sand, its hips a deep purple-black. And here and there, sea buckthorn stands thick, with berries the color of a match head. The summertime blue of Sea Holly has given way now to steel gray skeletons, which rattle stiffly. When the dunes break open, the beach is suddenly enormous. The tide well out, and the wind whisking up a fine layer of the dry upper beach sand. The flat wet sand on the shore holds the sky's color in long silver sheets, and the gulls above it lean into the wind. A group of sandlings chase the waves, and are chased back in a comical scurry. And further out, a skein of Brent geese beats low along the coast, newly arrived from the Arctic for the winter, calling to each other in a soft conversational honk. The strand line is its own museum, bleached driftwood turned smooth and gray and bone-like, a crab's shell, the black twist of a mermaid's purse, frayed blue rope, a scatter of razor shells like broken pencils. The tide turns, and starts almost imperceptibly to reclaim the land.

As we walk out to meet it, our feet sink into the Aeolian ripples, thin stripes of sand and water that flicker under our swift steps. Soon we are dodging the moon jellyfish, sitting marooned until the tide rescues them. By the time it does, the real moon will be up, and they'll be matching it, glowing with soft blue luminescence.

Moon phases. Last quarter moon, 3rd of October. New moon, 10th of October. First quarter moon, 18th of October. Full moon, 26th of October. The full moon this month is the hunter's or blood moon, named for the hunting season that comes in autumn when quarry has been fattened up on summer's bounty. For people living off the land, this was the season to creep out under the moon with bows and arrows, traps and snares, to fill the stores for winter. Those with livestock would now bring in their cows, pigs and sheep to winter pastures and buyers, choosing which to feed and which would be feeding them.

The fading light and flickering sand play tricks, bringing the sea's edge now nearer, now further, making an inconstant mirror of the shallow pools and sheets of shifting water. The sea is notorious for deceiving the eye, but still, that looks like a ship in full sail, coming swiftly from the horizon. It is being whisked towards us by the wind, which also brings a voice, singing from the prowl.