Samhain: When the Veil Grows Thin

There is an hour in late October when the light over the pasture turns the colour of old brass, and the shadows beneath the live oaks go long and blue, and the Spanish moss stops moving altogether.

The marigolds are still burning. The last zinnias are going over. Somewhere out in the rows a pumpkin that has been quietly turning from green to something near black since August is finally ready to be carried in.

This is Samhain — and if you are reading this in Ocala, it arrives with its meanings slightly rearranged.

In the countries where the festival began, Samhain marked an ending. The harvest was in, the cattle were brought down off the summer grazing, and what the land would give had been given. Here in North Central Florida, the same fortnight is when the garden wakes up. We are gathering the last of summer and sowing the first of winter in the same afternoon, often in the same bed.

Which makes this, we think, an unusually good place to keep a festival about thresholds.

The Ancient Roots of SamhainSamain · Samhuinn · Sauin

It is pronounced SOW-in, with the stress at the front and the mh gone soft to a w. The Old Irish spelling is Samain; in Modern Irish it is Samhain, in Scottish Gaelic Samhuinn, in Manx Sauin. A Gaulish relative, SAMON[IOS], appears on the Coligny calendar.

The festival falls on 1 November, and because the Gaelic day was reckoned from sundown, it opens on the evening of 31 October. The Church later built its own calendar over the top of it: Pope Boniface IV fixed All Saints' Day on 1 November in the year 609, which made the night before All-Hallows Eve, and by about the year 1000 All Souls' Day had settled on 2 November.

What the old texts actually say

Rather less than the internet does, and rather more interestingly.

Samain in the medieval Irish sources is above all a gathering. It is tied to the feis, the feast, and to the óenach, the assembly — occasions for law-making, games, horse-racing, boasting and settling disputes. Serglige Con Culainn describes an Ulster assembly lasting seven days. In Lebor Gabála the Fomoire demand their tax of produce and people at Samain. The great tales set their hinges here: Echtra Nera, Tochmarc Emire, Togail Bruidne Da Derga. In Cath Maige Tuired the Dagda meets the Morrígan at Samain, and the meeting decides a war.

What runs through all of it is not ghosts but threshold — a hinge in the year when the ordinary rules of the world are briefly off their hinges too, and the boundary with the Otherworld is thinner than it was yesterday.

In many modern Pagan and witchcraft traditions Samhain is also kept as the Witch's New Year — a beginning located inside an ending. That is a living, contemporary observance with real meaning for the people who keep it. It simply isn't an inheritance from the Iron Age, and it loses nothing by being described accurately.

When the Veil Grows ThinRemembrance, and the keeping of names

Beneath Halloween's theatre there is a quieter season, and it is about memory.

The thinning of the veil, as it is understood in contemporary Pagan and witchcraft practice, is a time when the distance between the living and whatever lies past them feels shorter than usual. For some that is a matter of genuine spiritual practice. For others it is simply the one night of the year set aside for thinking deliberately about the people who are gone.

The customs vary enormously. The impulse does not. To remember someone is to keep a portion of them present.

The Dumb Supper

Among the practices kept by some modern witches and Pagans is the Dumb Supper, sometimes called a silent supper. A place is laid for someone who has died — often with a photograph, a candle, a small object that belonged to them. The meal may be eaten in silence, so that there is room for the remembering.

It should be said that the Dumb Supper as practised today is not a documented ancient Celtic rite. Its shapes come from later folk custom and from modern observance. That does not diminish it. A chair left empty, a recipe made again, a few minutes given over to somebody's absence — the meaning of that does not depend on its age.

Flowers for the ones we remember

Gardens have always been one of the ways people hold on to each other. A rose put in for someone. A grandmother's particular dahlia. A tree grown from a seed picked up on a day that mattered.

At Valhalla Hall we keep coming back to the fact that a garden stores more than plants. A handful of saved seed can carry a garden that no longer exists anywhere else. A flower that returns every spring can return a person with it.

A note on borrowed symbols: cempasúchil marigolds belong to Mexico's Día de los Muertos, which is its own festival with its own history, its own dates and its own meanings. We grow them and we love them, and we think they deserve to be honoured as what they are rather than folded into Samhain as though the two were interchangeable.

The Legend of Stingy JackBefore the pumpkin, a turnip

Long before pumpkins glowed on American porches, the lantern of the season was carved from a root.

The story, as it is usually told, concerns a man called Stingy Jack, who invited the Devil for a drink and then declined to pay for it. He persuaded the Devil to turn himself into a coin to settle the bill — and then pocketed the coin next to a silver cross, which held the Devil in that shape. Jack let him go on terms: a year's grace, and his soul left alone if he died.

A year later he did it again, coaxing the Devil up a tree and cutting a cross into the bark so he could not climb down. This time the price was ten years.

When Jack finally died, Heaven would not have him. The Devil, bound by his own promise and in no mood for charity, would not have him either, and turned him out into the dark with a single burning coal for company. Jack put the coal inside a hollowed-out turnip, and has been walking with it ever since.

The Irish called the figure Jack of the Lantern. The name wore down to jack-o'-lantern.

In Ireland and Scotland people carved faces into turnips and set them in windows and doorways to turn Jack and his company away. In England they used large beets. When Irish and Scottish families carried the custom across the Atlantic they found a native vegetable that was enormous, soft-fleshed and almost designed for the purpose, and the pumpkin took the job.

A little lantern lore for the garden

There is something satisfying in the fact that the original jack-o'-lantern was a root crop — something pulled out of the ground, given a face, and set alight against the dark.

It also happens to be a thing Ocala gardeners can do properly. Turnips are a straightforward cool-season crop here, sown from September. A lantern carved from a turnip you grew yourself is a considerably better story than one bought in a net bag.

The Samhain Garden in OcalaWhere autumn is a beginning

Here are the two numbers that govern everything below.

First autumn frost

2 December, on average

Last spring frost

5 March, on average

Growing season

271 days

The basis

NOAA 1991–2020 climate normals for the Ocala station, at a 30 per cent probability. Which is to say: in roughly three years in ten, frost arrives earlier or leaves later than those dates. Treat them as the middle of a range, not a promise.

Nine months of frost-free growing, and the cold such as it is arriving only in December — that is why Samhain here is not the end of anything. While gardeners in Ireland are closing beds, we are opening them.

A word about which Florida you are in

Ocala sits almost exactly on the seam between what UF/IFAS calls North Florida and what it calls Central Florida, and the published gardening calendars for the two regions do not name counties. Marion County appears in neither.

In practice this means our planting windows are the overlap of the two, and that the difference between an exposed pasture and a sheltered town garden four miles away can be a fortnight. Where the two regional calendars disagree below, we have given both. Your own frost pocket will have the final word, and your county Extension office will know it better than any article.

Flowers for the Darker HalfWhat to plant while the light is going

Samhain does not require surrendering the flower garden. It requires changing its cast.

Calendula

Calendula officinalis. UF/IFAS calls it one of the most reliable cool-season annuals in Florida, which is high praise from an institution that hedges for a living. The flowers come butter-yellow through apricot to a deep orange that holds its own against autumn's heavier colours.

Light

Full sun, or part shade

Soil

Well drained; set plants 12 to 18 inches apart

Seed or plant

Seed. UF/IFAS notes that calendula seed is easier to come by than transplants

Edible

Yes — the flowers are edible, used whole as a garnish or dried and ground as a culinary colouring. Taste one first; some people find them bitter

We have deliberately not given calendula a “days to bloom” figure. UF/IFAS publishes neither a planting month nor a flowering period for it in Florida, and the numbers circulating online appear to come from northern growing guides. Sow it in the cool season and let it tell you.

Black Bachelor's Button

Centaurea cyanus. The darkest thing we grow, and the one that asks for the most patience. Sown now, it will not reward you now.

Sow

October into November, direct where it is to flower — it dislikes having its roots handled

Expect

Flowers in the cool months, generally late winter into spring

Use

Excellent fresh; dries well for next autumn's arrangements

Black Bachelor's Button seeds →

Snapdragons, and the rest of the cool-season bench

UF/IFAS puts dianthus, petunia and pansy in the ground in October for Central Florida, and adds viola, snapdragon, cape daisy and sweet alyssum in November. North Florida's calendar leans on pansy, viola and chrysanthemum in November, and suggests October for sowing native wildflowers.

Snapdragons are the ones to plant if you want height and the look of an old garden — upright spires in burgundy, cream and antique pink, and among the best cutting flowers of the Florida winter.

The Autumn Kitchen GardenSown as the wheel turns

There is a particular pleasure in harvesting from a garden that is supposed to be asleep. Below are the UF/IFAS Central Florida figures — planting window, then days from sowing to first harvest. Where a second figure appears in brackets, it is the count from a transplant rather than from seed.

Roots

Radishes are the instant gratification of the autumn garden — three to four weeks, start to finish, which means a row sown on Samhain night is on the table by the end of November. Carrots are the opposite, and the figure is worth taking seriously: up to four months in the ground, in loose soil, from seed sown directly. Nothing about a carrot can be hurried.

Greens

Most of these will give you a long, slow harvest rather than a single crop, if you take the outer leaves and leave the plant standing. Chard will run from September right through to May, which makes it the most patient thing in the bed.

Brassicas

The bracketed figures are the argument for buying transplants: three to five weeks saved on every one of them. A cabbage sown from seed at Samhain is a March cabbage. A transplant set out the same week is a January one.

Strawberries — and the date that matters

If you take one practical thing from this article, take this: strawberries go in during October.

Both UF/IFAS calendars say to set plants this month, and the North Florida calendar is blunter still — it calls October the last month for planting. Ocala sits on that line, so the conservative reading applies. A fortnight's delay costs you fruit.

Plant

October, from transplants, into well-drained ground or containers

Water

Daily until established — this is the step people skip

Crown

Set so the crown sits at soil level. Buried, it rots; proud, it dries

Harvest

Through the cool season, winter into spring

Frost

Protect open flowers and developing fruit when a freeze is forecast

The Ocala Samhain CalendarWhat goes in now, and what it gives back

These windows are drawn from the UF/IFAS Florida Vegetable Gardening Guide and the North and Central Florida gardening calendars, read together because Ocala straddles the two. Adjust to your own ground, and protect against frost from early December.

Sowing the Seeds of SpringAnd the discipline of not starting yet

The most tempting thing to do at Samhain, with the seed catalogue open and the evenings closing in, is to start next year's tomatoes.

Don't.

Why October is too early

UF/IFAS puts the rule simply: start seeds indoors four to eight weeks before the outdoor planting date. Work backwards from Ocala's average last frost of 5 March and the arithmetic does itself. Eight weeks back from an early-March set-out is the second week of January. Six weeks back is the end of January.

A tomato sown in October will be a leggy, root-bound, flowering thing in a four-inch pot by Christmas, two months before it can safely go out. It will never catch up with one sown in January. The weeks between now and then are not wasted — they are for choosing varieties, ordering seed, cleaning trays and mixing compost.

Gardeners willing to cover against a late frost sometimes start a fortnight earlier, to get fruit set before May heat shuts the tomatoes down. That is a calculated risk rather than a recommendation.

Bringing a little sunlight indoors

A windowsill is not enough, and UF/IFAS says so: only south- or west-facing windows are bright enough, seedlings on a sill lean toward the glass, and the trays need turning 180 degrees every couple of days to keep them honest. Too little light makes a seedling tall, pale and permanently weak.

A full-spectrum LED fixture on a timer solves all of it. Keep the light directly above the plants and raise it as they grow, so the distance stays roughly constant. Fourteen to sixteen hours of light, and darkness for the rest — seedlings rest as surely as we do.

Warmth

Peppers and eggplant germinate poorly when cold. A horticultural heat mat under the tray helps. Never improvise one from a heating pad or Christmas lights — UF/IFAS warns about the fire risk, and they are right to

Reading the plants

Reaching, stretching, pale wide leaves means too little light or too few hours. Bleached or crisped leaf tips mean too close or too strong. An inch or two either way settles both

Hardening off

Begin with about two hours of morning sun and build up daily until they can take a full day outside. Brown patches or bad wilting means bring them in for a day

Planting out

Choose a cloudy day or late afternoon. Water daily for the first week, and give no fertiliser for ten to fourteen days

Our longer account of choosing and using a grow light sits in The Enchanted Halloween Garden →

A Garden of RemembranceThe table, the lantern, the seed

The two halves of Samhain want to sit on the same table: the looking back, and the going on.

Set it outdoors if the evening allows — under an oak, with the moss moving. Pumpkins gathered from wherever you could find them. Candles and lanterns, enough of them. The last marigolds and zinnias the garden will give you this year, cut short and crowded into something low enough to see across.

Somewhere on it, a photograph, or a thing that belonged to somebody.

A turnip lantern, if you grew one, for Jack. A pumpkin one for the Halloween everybody actually knows.

And somewhere near the edge, a few paper envelopes of seed — saved from this year's garden, labelled, waiting. It is a strange and good thing to have the next season physically present at a feast about the last one.

There is no correct way to keep Samhain. For some it is genuinely devotional. For others it is harvest, family, and being glad. The garden has room for both, which is rather the point: gardening is the ongoing relationship between what has lived, what is living, and what has not grown yet.

From Samhain to YuleThe wheel turns toward the longest night

After Samhain the days keep shortening until the solstice. The sun tracks lower, the oaks finally drop what they are going to drop, and the garden goes quiet in the particular Florida way that is not dormancy at all.

Underneath it: radishes swelling. Strawberry crowns putting out roots. Snapdragons building the stems they will flower on. Chard and kale doing their patient work in light that northern gardeners would not believe.

And indoors, in January, a tray under a lamp.

Yule is the next chapter of the Wheel, and the next of these. We will take it into the winter garden, the solstice, and the beginning of the spring sowing.

Until the Wheel Turns Again

Samhain asks two things at once, which is why it has outlasted the civilisations that invented it. Look back with gratitude. Look forward anyway.

The old stories give us wandering spirits, a coal in a turnip, a boundary gone thin for a night. The garden tells a quieter version of the same thing. Flowers that come back from seed nobody planted. Trees still standing over the people who put them in. Roots working away in the dark where nothing appears to be happening.

Here, where October opens the season instead of closing it, the lesson is hard to miss. The pumpkins of summer become the lanterns of autumn. The last flowers give way to the winter ones. What goes into the ground beneath Samhain's sky is what gets harvested on the other side of the year.

For within every seed lies a story not yet told. A garden not yet grown. A season not yet arrived.

May your lanterns burn well, your harvest be enough, and your seed keep safely until its time.

Until the wheel turns again.
From the gardens of Valhalla Hall
Pollinator & Heirloom Seed Farm · North Central Florida

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