Pumpkin Patch at Tulleys Farm

Tulleys in the last week of September, when the whole farm has quietly turned orange. We got there late in the afternoon, which turned out to be exactly right — thin rippled cloud across the whole sky, the sun sitting low behind it, and a couple of hours of soft light left before everything went gold.

The first thing you meet is the yard: a tall timber house with its gable stacked floor to ceiling with pumpkins, every shelf full, pale ones lined along the roof ridge like piped icing. Wooden crates of white pumpkins and warty cream squash below. And perched on a barrel in the middle of it all, someone else's two doodles in matching gingham bandanas, sitting shoulder to shoulder and posing for the whole queue of phones like they'd been booked for it. Not ours, sadly, but I couldn't walk past without a photo.

Then the field. It's the thing you come for and it doesn't disappoint — a whole meadow scattered with pumpkins, hundreds of them lying in the grass stalks-up, running all the way back to the treeline. You wander with your head down, turning them over, rejecting the lopsided ones and then going back for them. I found a tall narrow one with a good curl of stem and sat cross-legged in the grass with it as if I'd grown it myself. At the edge of the field an old blue Land Rover waits on the gravel, TULLEYS on the number plate and pumpkins piled in the back. I leaned on it, obviously.

Past the field it becomes less farm and more folly. Someone at Tulleys has a great many pumpkins and a great deal of imagination. There's a round hut walled entirely in gourds — orange, cream, striped green, every size stacked like bricks — under a shaggy thatch of dried corn stalks. A hot-air balloon built from pumpkins, orange panels striped with white, hovering on steel legs over a bed with script lettering picked out in white pumpkins on orange. A little gazebo with pumpkins climbing its roof in rows and a skeleton lounging at every post. And toadstools: fat domes of red and white pumpkins on stalks, some tiered with pale ones on top, standing about in the grass like something out of a storybook.

The centre of it all is a stone-edged pond with a small waterfall, and around it the planting has gone full autumn — mounds of chrysanthemums in plum, pink, rust and butter yellow, each one sitting on its own collar of little pumpkins, with more of them floating out on the water in round planters. From the grassy bank above you can see how the whole thing is laid out: curving gravel paths, split-rail fences, beds of pumpkins in rings and spirals, the thatched huts and the barns beyond. It's much bigger than it looks from the car park.

Round the far side, a rusty old pickup — Tulleys Farm lettered on the door, chrysanthemums in the back — sits up on a rockery with water pouring out of its grille and down a stream lined with pumpkins. It's completely ridiculous and I loved it. We sat on a wooden bench in front of the toadstools for a while and just watched everyone else find it.

The quieter corners were my favourite. The big Tulleys barn under its tin roof, shelves of pumpkins garlanded in red leaves, a wheelbarrow of them parked out front. A woodland path with pumpkins tucked under the trees on either side, the light green and dappled. A spiralling arch hung with copper leaves, like walking through a tunnel of October a week early. And then the sun came down behind the pond — the sky rippled silver and gold, the gourd hut and the toadstools going to silhouette, the water holding all of it.

We left back through the yard under strings of festoon lights, crates heaped with red and striped pumpkins glowing in the last of the sun. Autumn, officially open.