“What is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days.”—James Russell Lowell
By the first of June sunrise occurs at 5:16 and sunset at 8:22. Summer doesn’t officially arrive this year until late Sunday night on June the twentieth. But the days have lengthened and the weather is often summer-sultry. I spend many hours in the garden and the times I prefer are early in the morning and late in the day.
Morning has always been my favorite and most productive time. In the garden it is the best time to water, to pick flowers and produce, to take photographs, and to get down to earth to weed before the sun scorches. The birds are wakening and gently serenading. The light before sunrise has a peaceful, still, muted quality. Our earth’s atmosphere receives and scatters the shorter blue wavelengths of light while the red pass on into space. Hence, the light of the hour before sunrise or hour after sunset is known as the blue hour, or “l’heure bleue.”
“The French call this time of day “l’heure bleue,” to the English it was the “gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes - the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour - carrying in it’s consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass lined rivers slipping through the shadows.” — Joan Didion
Evening and the hour after sunset feels like the gloaming more than the morning. The beauty and quiet produced by the dying of the day has an intrinsic melancholy which the newness of the morning doesn’t carry. Evening falls into the gloaming with a blue light and a bit of blue sadness. Another day is gone.
“I’d go roamin’ in the gloamin’
Ever and a day with you.
Oh yes, I will.
I’d go roamin’ in the gloamin’. — Van Morrison
The first and last hours of sun are the golden hours. In the morning the sun rises; flower buds open; the heat increases with the golden light. In the evening the last, angled rays of sun feel less enervating. The lengthened time of daylight in June creates a month of voluptuousness; think roses, peonies, irises, poppies, strawberries. There is green, still new and fresh, and masses of blooms that perfume the air, then discard petals with decadent charm. A hot midday in June is a moment to pick strawberries, full of the heat of the sun. Let the blood-red juices drip through your fingers and down your chin and imagine strawberry fields forever.
I fondly remember one morning a few years ago. My granddaughters were visiting. I woke early and went down to the garden in the blue hour, before sunup. I was on my knees, weeding, when I sensed footsteps coming down the stone steps. A little girl with serious bedhead and sleepy eyes told me, “I knew I would find you here.” And she did.
“Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.” — John Muir