New born leaf

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 coloring in autumn and falling precisely here.

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 sands. 

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.