Leaf Curl

In his classic essay, Autumnal Tints, Henry David Thoreau wrote of fallen leaves: "How beautifully they go to their graves!...They teach us how to die."  Thoreau was forever drawing moral lessons out of nature.  For most suburban home owners, dead leaves are tree trash. Fall in my neighborhood means the loathsome sound of leaf blowers.  The people next door have a lawn service.  I think the lawn service gets its leaf blowers from an aircraft engine factory. I rake my leaves, but I can do that because I am retired and can spend parts of several days swishing up piles of leaves and trundling them in a large plastic tarp to the curb, where they are vacuumed up by large trucks and taken to a county mulch pile.  The county will recycle the leaves and deliver mulch in the spring.

Thoreau did not dwell on his death metaphor.  Autumnal Tints records his close observation of the turning of the trees in and around Concord, Massachusetts. He extolled the vivid reds, brilliant yellows, and mellow oranges of the maples, oaks, and elms that made up the majority of the trees in his dwelling spaces. He even exclaimed over the colorfully variegated mixtures of leaves fallen from a several different, close standing species of trees.  Thoreau's eyes in this essay were on the tints of tree leaves, and this is their most readily noticeable autumnal feature.  When they fall to the ground, they soon lose their coloration and lie on the ground, inert and brown.  But pick up a leaf and turn it around in your hand.  Fallen leaves shrivel as their lose their water content.  They sometimes curl in exquisitely sculptural forms.  Below are three different Chestnut Oak leaves.  I've arrayed them to display the various complexities of form manifested by leaf curl.  First is a simple folding over from the tip of the leaf.  Next is a double, asymmetric curl along the length of the leaf's sides.  Finally, there is an elaborate twist that I think is dynamically appealing.  Leaf curl is a subtle dimension of the aesthetic pleasure of looking closely at leaves, but sculpturally curled leaves are rare and it's been my experience that you have to wade through a lot of fallen leaves to find something worth putting up on your blogsite.

Fold

Lenghtwise Curl

 

Twist