Under oak trees, leaves cover the woodland floor.
Each leaf is an individual: some are pale as paper, some dark as pitch; some rich as mahogany or chocolate, some poor thin shreds.
Each leaf has a story: from clenched grey buds bursting into bronze, opening into this year’s glorious spring and deepening into one of the best summer’s green before colouring in autumn and falling precisely here.
Each leaf is a biology diagram for the carbon cycle; photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration, terms that hardly capture the magic of turning sunlight into woodland and breathing weather.
Each leaf is a page in the tree’s journal of the nomadic travels of moths and beetles; tiny wasps injecting leaves with eggs from which they create extraordinary galls; birds from Africa come to forage, sing, give birth and go back.
Each leaf is an archive of the sunshine, rain, wind and gales that shaped them up in the canopy all year, then made them drop. Now the weather sorts them down on the ground, shuffles them as they settle, take in water, dissolve and decompose.
Oak leaves smell beery with the tang of tannin and the sweetness of rot. Culpepper the herbalist quotes Hippocrates who believed fumes of oak leaves cure women of an hysterical anxiety called, “the strangling of the mother”. The scent is soothing and heady and a fragrance which loses the light of summer to become darker and redolent of winter and its tales.
Oak stories circle the afterimage of a magical-holy tree, such as those of the ferocious Herne the Hunter; the ritual slaying of the wren as Oak King on Boxing Day; the Yule log which must be found or given but never bought and only brought into the house to burn during the festivities on 24 December.
All these oak leaves on the ground tell their own stories but there is another of the last leaf. Even in the depths of winter a few dead leaves still hang on the tree. Repay debts to the Devil when the last oak leaf falls - it never does.
