e.e. cummings wrote, “a wind has blown the rain away and blown / the sky away and all the leaves away, / and the trees stand. / i think i, too, have known autumn too long.”
“It took only a single flake to freeze my mind in the snowy night, / A few clangs to smash my dreams among the frosted bells, / And the stove’s night fire fragrance too is melted away, / Yet at my window the moon climbs a solitary peak.” Han-Shan Te-Ching (1546-1623) from Mountain Living, translated by James M. Cryer.
Adelaide Crapsey in a poem called November Night from the collection Verse published by Alfred A. Knopf, wrote, “Listen… / With faint dry sound, / Like steps of passing ghosts, / The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees / And fall.”
Yesterday during all that rain I was out in the garden by the pond shutting down the waterfall and cleaning the filters. I had left the pond open longer than maybe I should have this year anticipating the kind of late autumn we had last year. I thought I could get away with running the pond filters for a while yet before having to clean and dry them for winter storage. The dire forecast about last night’s winter storm gave me no choice but to head out in the pouring rain to do the last remaining chores. It’s also the reason why there was no blog entry yesterday.
We have a huge magnolia tree that was planted when my daughter was born. It is now fourteen years of age. Every spring and summer it brings forth the most magnificent blooms that are waxy to the touch but extremely fragrant. It is the first perfume that comes from our gardens when the year begins to emerge from its winter hibernation. If you look back through my blogs you will find photos of the blooms this tree rewards us with every spring. It is so tall that it now towers well above the second storey of our house. You can just imagine how many leaves there are to rake up. We also have a huge linden at the far corner of our property that was no doubt planted shortly after the first owners moved in. It, too, drops enough leaves to fill many yard waste bags. Our chestnut tree that is now tall enough to afford some privacy for our swimming pool dropped most of its leaves a few weeks back.
I found some interesting information concerning the number of leaves that certain trees put forth. If you have found raking to be back-breaking labor this year, it might have a lot to do with these figures, and depending on how many mature trees there are in your neighborhood. This called Tree Facts by Magazet in the 1983 Canadian Farm and Home Almanac. “We don’t vouch for these figures but they are interesting: A good-sized poplar tree has 70,000 leaves; an apple tree, up to 100,000; a birch, 200,000; a fifty-foot sugar maple, 162,500; an average oak, 700,000; an American elm, more than 5,000,000–enough to cover almost a mile of forty-foot highway. A Monterey pine is credited with 8,000,000 needles. The white pine’s foliage would cover fifteen times the area overshadowed by its branches. And a 200-foot Douglas fir of the far west provides, it seems, a leaf surface encompassing 30,000 square feet, or nearly three-quarters of an acre.” Stanley Kunitz wrote, “Unless the leaves perish, the tree is not renewed.” (Something to remember when you’re raking the leaves and pine needles.)
There is a wonderful line by Edna St. Vincent Millay that reads, “Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, / Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, / Yet knows its boughs more silent than before…” The boughs are just as silent after the leaves fall. The music they made when the winds rustled them is just an echo now. But they certainly make one final grand gesture before they go silent, by displaying some of their most spectacular colours. It’s almost music for the eyes. You might remember the music the angels heard when they gathered on the beach at sunrise and sunset in the film “City of Angels,” and how the fallen angel, Messinger, felt so lonely even among his former comrades because he could no longer hear it. I sometimes feel that way in November as my ears strain to hear the faint song of summer.
This is a poem called The Oak-Leaves by Edna St. Vincent Millay, published in Collected Lyrics published by Harper. “Yet in the end, defeated, too, worn out and ready to fall, / Hangs from the drowsy tree with cramped and desperate stem above the ditch the last leaf of all. / There is something to be learned, I guess, from looking at the dead leaves under the living tree; / Something to be set to a lusty tune and learned and sung, it well might be; / Something to be learned–though I was ever a ten-o’clock scholar at this school– / Even perhaps by me.
“But my heart goes out to the oak-leaves that are the last to sigh / ‘Enough,’ and loose their hold; / They have boasted to the nudging frost and to the two-and-thirty winds that they would never die, / Never even grow old. / (These are those russet leaves that cling / All winter, even into spring, / To the dormant bough, in the wood knee-deep in snow / the only coloured thing.”
For the past month, I have been raking and bagging the leaves for pickup. After the last few leaves are down, it is usually a signal for me to begin the preparations for winterizing the pond. I felt bad having to disturb the koi and the goldfish. They are already deep in their winter hibernation. When the water temperature gets cold enough, their systems begin to slow down. We stopped feeding them sometime back when the water got cold enough. We have a spring and fall food supply that is easy on their digestion. They build up their stamina with their summer diet to last them over the course of our long Canadian winter. They go into a deep sleep that will see them through until the spring. People ask me why we leave them outside for the winter. This natural cycle allows them to grow hardier and more disease-resistant. I carefully pulled up the deep water filter that feeds the waterfall and cleaned it. I put in the heater that floats on the surface to keep a hole in the ice. I was soaked to the skin but the job had to be done, and after all the freezing rain that blanketed everything in sight in a thin layer of ice this morning, I was glad that I had finished the last of my autumn duties the day before.
I may put off this one last chore for another reason. When I finish, I know that summer has truly left for warmer climes. There will be no more soft summer breezes for butterflies and dragonflies to float upon, no more quiet afternoons to enjoy outdoors, no more perfumes from summer flowers to scent the air. It’s like the sound of a door closing behind you to do this kind of work.
Michael Pollan from Second Nature published by the Atlantic Monthly Press wrote, “A garden that never died eventually would grow weary. Robbed of springtime, unacquainted with the extraordinary perfume that rises from the soil after its had its rest, the garden winter does not visit is a dull place. The return every spring of earth’s first freshness would never be kept if not for the frosts and rot and ripe deaths of fall. So when I go out from the garden for the last time in autumn, I leave the gate open behind me.”
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Don Jackson
