A Catalog of Leaf-Fall
We owe it to posterity
Has anyone ever tried to make a catalog of leaf-fall? After an excessively dry summer--a summer containing the longest stretch of rainless days in more than twenty years in this part of the country--the local trees are cutting their losses by tossing the ballast early. Many of the maples are already outlined in scarlet, and the oaks have begun to don their ceremonial academic brown. We tend to think of fall as a ubiquitous process: the grand, moldy, spectacular undoing of the forests stripped down to a single blackened element as if by fire. Fall happens, as it were, and the boughs are empty against the sky.
But in reality, what we think of as “fall” is actually the concurrence of a thousand distinct processes. Each species of tree, and each individual within the species, behaves as idiosyncratically as the puppies in a litter or artists in a school. And nowhere are these differences so clear as in their apocalyptic autumn molt. Every kind of leaf falls differently, as a simple walk through the late-September woods will show us. I've never seen anyone try to make a record of these differences, so I'm going to do so here.
Birches, with their spectacular, anti-gravitational habit of leaning out at suicidal angles from the edges of forests or over roads, always go canary yellow. The wind blowing through them creates a distinct shiver of batting movements and a sound like a flipped rainstick. As they fall, the fat flat arrowheads of the leaves dive toward the ground in an accelerating corkscrew, plunging like wingshot Spitfires. It's strange, then, that lindens, whose heart-shaped leaves are so similar to birches', tend to brown out in unspectacular emaciation, while the descent of the leaves is much more whimsical: a looping, fluttering bafflement that seems to multiply their distance from the earth. The skirt of fallen leaves around an autumn linden is inexplicably wide, and in the rain they form a brown, sluicing gore that pastes the pavement well into December.
Maples embrace every possibility of color, stripping on an aggressive timeline. There were two southern mountain maples in my yard growing up, and those old crones disintegrated in burning finery every year, changing their outfits without any decipherable pattern: sometimes liquid bronze, sometimes moody cinnabar, sometimes flamed ocre or silver-fringed butterscotch. The wind in a maple creates the impression of a scintillating, silvery mass kneading and twisting on itself like a school of panicked fish. Detached from the mother branches, maple leaves fall with a lazy grace, easing earthward for long, still stretches punctuated by odd inversions as calculated-looking as a diver's.
By contrast, oaks cling to most of their leaves like an almond-colored cloak while the acorns rattle and plunge. Even in high wind, the leather-thick oak leaves project stability, moving as heavily as an embattled outpost or soaked mainsail, but with an incredible papery racket punctuated by the slapping gunfire of the acorns' fall. When the leaves do go, they're the only species I've seen that never flips. Like a spreadeagled skydiver in slow motion, they descend to earth with a definitive, sighing smack.
All of these undoings are fine in their own way but, for me, they can't compare to the loveliest of all: the walnuts and the locusts. Perennially lazy, walnuts wait until well into May to extrude their whiplike fronds, flanked by double rows of flame-shaped leaves. These always turn a rich, saffron yellow in September and begin to descend even in windless stillness, as if summer life had been a burden. When they detach, their constant, fanning spiral is mesmerizing, a continuous movement held like an operatic note until the coda of groundfall. Occasionally, the timpani of a hurtling walnut will shatter the swell, ripping off vertical columns of leaves and sending them windward in flocks like frightened birds. But even this exercise in contrasts can't compare to the autumn of a locust. Their thorny, tortured mass of black branches also lets its leaves turn yellow early; a freckled potatoish yellow like the skin of a ripe pear. But it's the size of the locusts' leaves that makes them the queens of leaf-fall: tiny, sputtering flames that flit and spiral toward the ground, never still, buffetted into fresh acrobatics by the slightest wind. Japanese poets wrote endlessly about the spring spectacle of cherry blossoms, whose brevity was, for them, a metaphor for evanescent life. I've come to think of locusts as the autumn equivalent: in a breeze, the air fills with their multitudes, and you can see every invisible current outlined in a fluttering murmuration of variegated flame. If you have any locusts nearby, you shouldn't hesitate to visit: a single unlucky storm or windy day will knock them all away, leaving only the empty black nest of the stripped branches.
This catalog is, of course, incomplete. But it's a start. I realize that I've risked a bit of preciousness here--maybe even plunged far in that dubious direction. But it's worth the risk for the sake of noticing.
The Classical Roots Substack is a free and easy escape from a busy world. Share it with a friend and get even more content:
Observant and lyrical...thanks for the verbal painting of fall.