As the light fades and dusk approaches, gardeners can grab a few precious moments in the garden. But defining exactly when twilight falls is more complicated than you’d think
Twilight is magical to gardeners, most particularly to those of us who work full time, and dash out to grab a few minutes’ gardening fix post-work, before darkness descends. Right now, dusk is moving in alarmingly fast. It falls more than an hour earlier than it did at the beginning of the month, as we hurtle towards the day the clocks go back, on October 30. These are the last of the dusk gardening days.
Dusk and twilight are beautiful, evocative words and times. They are also little more complex than you might think. I am currently crowdfunding to create a reinvention of the rural almanac, which will contain tables on moon phases, sunrises and sunsets, the sky at night, seasonal gardening and food. A book about the measure of things. And so I have been researching twilight and have found that there is more to it than I thought. There are of course many beautifully poetic names for dusk – dimmet, the gloaming, simmer dim in Scotland, the dimpsy in Devon – but there are also official names for each of the three stages of twilight and dusk. So here are civil twilight, nautical twilight and astronomical twilight and their dusks explained, followed by the times you can expect each tonight. (Times given are for Birmingham, it being roughly in the middle of the UK.)
Continue reading...from Gardening blog | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2ddjNZC
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