THE LAST FEW LEAVES

Back to the park today. I’ve been photographing the Pagoda Tree as it’s been changing through the autumn.

I stand so that the television mast on the other side of the valley sits exactly in the natural dip in the crown of a tree at the edge of the park. Then, to my left, two slender trunks line up so that the nearer is hidden by the farther, and on the other side, just above the green netting of The Little Coffee Express, a leafless tree matches up with a taller poplar behind it.

I’ve tried poking holes in the soil with the tip of my umbrella to mark the spot. They got filled in by rain and worms, I guess. Then I had wedged a short twig in the ground, hoping it would stay. Dogs must have run off with it, or it got blown about. Nope - triangulation still seems like the best method to capture the same shot each time. It works pretty well.

There were only a few yellowing leaves left on the Pagoda Tree today. It’s been shedding them for a while now, and today those last, very solitarily looking leaves were stubbornly clinging on to the dark branches. I stared up at them in the bright blue sky.

Life is a matter of perspective isn’t it? Further into the park, the Rogue Oak was still full and green. There’s a hardiness to oaks! That’s how they’ve sheltered kings, swung open castle doors, and bolstered the English navy. Those leaves would probably barely tan brown, let alone fall to the park.

And there I was, in the spidery shadow of the Pagoda Tree; a beauty stripped of her cloak, the last few finely-spun snags of fabric she wore, now shivering on the empty frame.

Everybody, I concluded, reacts differently to the same season.

What’s great about trees is that each of them is doing their own thing - no-one co-ordinates the colours or choreographs the wind. In that unique way that all living things have hardwired into them: life, making room for the new season, the old, it was all giving way to the new - the trees just know what to do. And they get on and do it. And no two are ever the same.

The firs can’t say the beeches are doing it wrong. The oak can’t criticise the sycamores and the elms. The Pagoda Tree isn’t jealous of the Five Sisters or the Rogue Oak, and neither does it need to be. It’s magnificent. She is magnificent.

I put a hand out and touched the cool, stripy bark. It was damp, dark, earthy to the touch as though it had pushed itself through wet soil and cold rock to be there. The wind made me shiver, and just for a moment I wondered whether the Pagoda Tree was shivering in sympathy with me. It would have been poetic, I thought, if at that moment a last leaf had detached itself and had floated to the grass.

But that didn’t happen. All that happened was me. I sighed, thrust my hands in my coat pockets, and crunched home over the crispy, dead leaves underfoot.