autumn leaves

The leaves are turning.  We've been exclaiming to each other for a few days what wonderful shades of red the maples in pots have gone.  Yesterday afternoon, with the low sun streaming on them, they looked positively luminous.  The field maples in the hedge are going butter yellow in irregular patches, and the vase shaped crab apple Malus tschonoskii is assuming bright shades of amber, though its leaves don't last very long before they drop.  The birches are turning pale yellow, and only the willows along the ditch refuse to play, dropping their leaves without any attempt at an autumn show.

The oak trees are more sombre.  They have started to turn a muted shade of brown, but don't have any truck with these bright bonfire shades, whereas driving through Elmstead Market today I noticed a tree on the verge turning to a beautiful medley of dark oranges and yellows.  It has divided leaves, but is not a common ash, and I should park up there sometime and wander along with my tree book to see if I can identify it.  Black walnut?

It's a good game, once you know what a local tree is, watching how it behaves through the seasons. If you happen to see it close up for any reason, at a point when it is doing something characteristic that allows you to work out what kind of tree it is, then you can give it a quick glance each time you drive past, or a longer one if stuck in traffic, and start to get the feel of its habit, the shape of its naked branches when it's out of leaf, what its fruits are and whether it suckers at the base.  So many keys to trees focus mainly on leaves and twigs, it's easy to forget the whole tree.

BBC Four showed a documentary a couple of weeks ago about a year in the life of an oak tree, which is still available on the iPlayer for another sixteen days.  It's worth watching, if you like trees, with some clever time lapse photography, and an impressive and painstaking excavation of the entire root system of a young oak, but I didn't agree with the presenter when he described the tree in winter as looking dead.  A healthy oak in winter is so clearly alive, with its ordered network of branches dividing to small twigs, each terminating in a cluster of solid buds.  Equating leaves with life, and the absence of leaves with death, is anthropomorphising the tree.

It's a shame we don't have room to plant any more trees at home.  Indeed, some of the ones we do have are too close together, while some that I tried to squeeze into particularly barren and inhospitable corners have died.  But no amount of space is enough, if you really want to plant trees. The Hillier gardens cover 180 acres, admittedly not all given over to the arboretum, and if they had more space I'm sure they could easily fill it with good, garden worthy species and without repeating themselves.  Maybe we should drag ourselves away from the garden at home and pay a visit to Marks Hall, now the leaves are turning.