BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! The shriek of the alarm clock shreds the darkness, leaving in tatters that lovely dream into which you had just settled, but there’s no time to feel bitter nor annoyed nor even groggy, for there are things to be done! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! You flail about, slapping at the unseen alarm button until finally you hit it, silencing the offending racket.
Without further ado it’s up and out of bed! Although the new academic year is still in its early infancy, the school holidays are already a distant memory along with those summery poolside drinks. Now, there are kids to wake, lunch boxes to make, breakfasts to cobble together, uniforms to find (and probably iron at the last minute, knowing them) and school bags to assemble; you’re already scanning the calendar for appointments and after-school clubs, remembering – ah, blast! – that you need to book the car in for its MOT, and, all the while, that afternoon work meeting you have scheduled begins to loom large upon the horizon.
And so life locks back into its post-summer routine, one day much like the last and the next after it, and round and round you go until finally, after what seems a lifetime, you get a little weekend time to yourself. You have no commitments, nowhere you need to be and the kids won’t appear from their rooms for hours, so you take a quiet moment, stepping out into the garden with a coffee or going for an early walk with the dog. But something is different. When tangled up in the maelstrom of day-to-day duties it’s so difficult to find a still point anywhere, so when a quiet moment like this comes along, it often brings with it what seems like a plethora of sudden changes, when even the smallest modification can be startling, especially at this time of year.
The frayed ghosts of an early mist billow along the ground and a slight chill dampness in the air encircles the wrists and the neck, making you glad that you decided to put on that extra layer. As you scan around, you begin to realise that even the feel of the landscape has changed. The world that you left unattended in your busyness a week ago, a day ago or even just last night, has been caught out by this shift, like a forgotten woollen blanket draped across a garden chair or children’s toys left scattered out on a lawn before the coming of rain and, as you look a little more closely, you realise, with a start, that you’re already too late – a change is very much underway. Many of the leaves around you already sport a thin edge of rust. Autumn is almost here.
As marketable these days as any recognised seasonal holiday, and certainly a season of “fruitfulness”, the words ‘autumn’ and ‘fall’ are now laden with meanings and numerous connotations thanks to a seemingly endless number of memes featuring mugs of spiced hot chocolate, pumpkins and sweaters. Lovely as all these are though, the most appealing aspect of all, and certainly the most photo-worthy, is the enduring image of falling leaves, that slow-burning annual firework display which, despite taking some time to reach its climax, never fails to cause a sharp intake of breath and a muttered “wow” or two.
A sensual pleasure on so many levels, there are few things more satisfying during the latter months of the year than encountering a thick carpet of leaf-fall when out on a countryside walk. Its complex spectrum of reds, yellows, browns and golds hoarded in corners and upon pathways, in streets and parks, is an open invitation to stride through with a crunching kick-step and a barely-concealed grin. When we encounter such things we tend to take them in greedily, devouring the experience in one go, an occasional seasonal treat which makes sensory pigs of us all. However, as many of us only really have time to notice the tints of autumn when they have reached accumulation point like this, it’s so easy to miss the subtleties of sequence as the individual species of trees fall into line one-by-one and this great yearly procession begins.
Ash leaves are always amongst the first to fall in my local woodland areas, often still green when they hit the ground as though jumping ship first so as not to get left behind, though their position in this list is sadly under threat from the effects of ash dieback that ravages the population across the entire country. Soon after come the birch and poplar trees, their blotchy yellowy-green colour hinting at “a hundred indecisions, and…a hundred visions and revisions” taken and retaken before an untimely fall.
Not far behind at all will be the sycamores, their five-pointed leaves flaring bright red, in a nod to their maple lineage, their browned seed pods fluttering through the air to helicopter to the ground. The horse chestnuts, too, I can see in my local park, their big, palmate leaves, floppy as old banknotes, tumbling in tandem with their nuts, mine-like, scattered everywhere like nature’s own version of Battleships.
On they come, the beech, the instantly recognisable oak, hornbeam, willow – a litany of familiar names recited by rote as their turning is noticed, year-on-year until the latest tumblers – the larch and the ever-reluctant alder, which seems unwilling to join the party, its unchanged leaves simply falling in late November. There are, of course, far more tree species than I can mention here, and the sequence outlined above is never an exact science, but it’s always beautiful to bear slow witness to the transformation as it unfolds.
Talking of science, in my curiosity I spent some time a few years ago reading up to help me peer at the inner workings beneath the surface of the process. The actual falling of the leaves is down to a decrease in a hormone called auxin, the substance responsible for growth and development in trees, and an increase in ethylene, chemically triggering the release of the leaves. All very interesting, but what about those marvellous colours?
I always thought that the spectacular colour show was caused by mass transformation, a traffic-light shift of tints as the leaves themselves changed throughout the season, but this is only partially true. As chlorophyll breaks down in the autumn, anthocyanin is produced, turning some leaves the deep red hue so beloved by photographers, leaf peepers and enthusiasts of all things Fall. Some believe this to be a natural warning system designed to fend off insect infestation, whilst others claim that it provides protection from any damaging effects of sunlight whilst the tree concentrates upon reabsorbing nutrients from the leaves, but no-one is entirely sure of exactly why this happens.
Throughout the rest of the year we are used to seeing the bright green chlorophyll colour of leaves in full food-production mode, and this actually masks many of those autumnal hues which are already contained within the leaf. As the year turns, the temperatures dip, food production becomes less necessary and the chlorophyll levels decrease, allowing these other shades to shine through. This includes xanthophyll which is responsible for the bright yellow colour in leaves and also for the yellow of egg yolks, corn and some squashes, meaning that the link between this shade, the autumn and its synonymous images of piled Harvest bounties is more than simple romance and actually has much basis in scientific fact, something similarly true of the orange carotenes which give carrots their colour along with Fall foliage.
Interesting as these facts may be, however, I prefer to leave them in the reference books where they belong, for autumn, and its beautiful shades, have always stemmed from something far deeper than simple scientific understanding. It is that striking, tinted hinterland between summer and winter from which stem tradition and lore, stark realities and wildest imaginings. In each “soft-dying day”, with every coloured leaf that drifts to the ground, we are able to see the past and the future in one, where the foliage of last year is laid down as the store from which the woodland of next year will be replenished once again as it always has, and always will so that “whoever looks round sees Eternity there.”
