Those Falling Leaves

‘The falling leaves drift by my window...’ Don’t they just? September is here, the mornings are already cold, and the vine maples have been turning red in the woods for almost a month. ‘Autumn Leaves,’ this most romantic of American songs, however, turns out to be this most romantic of French songs. Words originally written by Jacques Prevert, lyrics by Joseph Kosma (both French), with the English lyrics to the credit of Johnny Mercer. The French lyrics don’t seem to be about autumn, so at least it is the most romantic of American lyrics about the seasons. In any case, when those falling leaves drift by my window, I don’t much think about the sun-burned summer I am leaving or how much I miss you, whoever you happen to be. That is because I am the steward (or the co-steward) of five or six big-leaf maple trees. Also sometimes called ‘dinner-plate maples because the leaves are the size of dinner plates. And they really are. So, if you are the custodian of five or six big leaf maples, you are the owner of bales of autumn leaves. And there is no romance in trying to figure out what to do with them.

This morning, I got up and swept several hundred of them off the deck--remember the phrase 'the size of dinner plates'; by noon, several hundred more had taken their place and we haven’t even begun to deal with the bulk of them; 90% are still on the trees. I raked today’s allotment up just now and stuffed two big garbage bags tightly: today’s autumn leaves. I store them back by the compost, but we are now collecting this year’s leaves and I haven’t yet finished with composting last year’s leaves. This is because there are just too many leaves. Several of the trees are in the woods and those leaves I don’t touch. It is only those on the deck, in the cleared areas around the house, in the near garden beds where autumn’s leaves will not protect the flowers over the winter but will protect the slugs who will then eat the flowers in the spring as they come up, right before I rake the leaves out of the bed. Thus, they have to be raked in the fall.

There is this strange abundance at this time of year. It’s not only the apples and plums, but also maple leaves. And you can add to that hydrangea flowers and dried lunaria pods. Point Roberts seems to be the perfect environment for both of them. The hydrangeas come in all colors and I can change their color by fooling with the soil chemistry or just by planting them somewhere else in the yard. All of the dozen or so hydrangeas in my yard are offspring of one hydrangea; new ones are made by sticking a cut stalk in the ground in August. That’s it.

Lunaria (often called ‘silver dollar plants’) put out these gorgeous seed pods in the fall after providing excellent purple flowers with dark green leaves in the early spring, flowers that provide a wonderful contrast to tulips and daffodils. Each circular, silver pod carries 3 or 4 seeds with twenty to a hundred pods on each stalk. My experience suggests that every single seed will grow into yet another lunaria plant, anxious to provide in alternate years more enormous stalks of silver dollar seed pods and seeds.

People are always talking about developing the economic base of Point Roberts, but the only thing they seem to be able to come up with to achieve this reasonable goal is to build more houses. My suggestion is that we take some of Point Roberts’ absolutely most abundant resources and figure out how to develop them economically instead: apples, plums, dried maple leaves, hydrangea blossoms, and lunaria pods. There may be a few other things like this (starfish? sand dollars?), but we could just start with the obvious ones and work out from there.