This shifting season paints itself in two trees outside my window. I rootled in a bag of coloured pencils at half-term for lime and sycamore, and began to draw. Though my sketching skills are limited, I have learned to see colour changes by the week, the day, and even in an instant, with the parting of clouds.
The old lime to the right is at the end of a line that once marked the boundary of a Victorian villa. Two weeks ago, my drawings would give it a strong mid-green base, for only the leaves on the outermost twigs curled and furled, all their chlorophyll sucked back into the core. This marked the patchy beginnings of a brief golden age, when previously subsumed carotenoids and xanthophylls gave the lime its first hues of autumn.
At dusk two weeks later, the whole tree is flushed dark bronze, though the shade deepens towards copper in the fading light, as if it were extinguished in the embers of the day. At dull dawn, the lime is cloaked in rust, but such subdued colouring can deceive. When the rising sun’s rays break through and slant in from the south-east, all is yellow-gold, so bright that it quickens my pencil and fills me with elation. But just an hour later, in this most changeable of weathers, a cast of cloud dampens the fire once more.
The sycamore to the left has proved slower to turn and has a stubborn north-west face. One whole bough flaunts a mostly emerald outpost, while the rest of the tree has retreated uniformly into amber. The sycamore’s giant, fingered leaves have that maple family durability, holding their shape, resisting any tendency to curl, overlapping to keep their dense canopy. Now, and only now, are they starting to drop – in my childhood, sycamore leaves rained down over half-term. Has the season rolled back to later in the year?
The picture will fragment in the gales. Seventeenth-century British settlers crossed the Atlantic and retained an older name for this season, one that was already going out of favour here. We have impenetrable autumn, America has the fall, sketching a picture of tumbling leaves with a single word.
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