Mourning for Margaret (An Object Lesson on a Leaf by Nina Katarina Štular)

It is very easy to overlook a tree leaf. Even though leafy trees are all around us, our eyes are accustomed to viewing their luscious foliage as one, rather than looking at a single leaf. Indeed, a magnificent red maple tree occasionally entices a passerby to pluck its leaf and press it between the pages of a book, preserving a memory of a lovely autumn day. In autumn, children perhaps amuse themselves by collecting leaves, a pastime that produces a quaint catalogue of deciduous kinds of trees that will in years join an old teddy bear and a photo album in a box of forgotten childhood trinkets. Even though such practices single out a leaf, these leaves are a mere representation of ‘oak tree leaves,’ or ‘a hike in Door County, September 2013.’ Rarely does one contemplate a tree leaf as a unique thing with a past, a present, and a future.

Like many, I spent hours in my high school Biology classroom, learning about molecular reactions that take place in a leaf, memorizing parts of a leaf’s morphology, and posing questions about plant capillarity, transpiration, and gas exchange. At the time, my classmates and I considered such knowledge solely as information we needed to know in order to pass the exams. Even while learning the most minute details of a leaf’s life, we failed to recognize a leaf as a remarkable unit of existence; blinded by the trees, we could not see the forest.

What do we miss by not paying attention to the complexity of a leaf’s life? Well, we miss about as much as we do when we stay silent instead of talking to a person next to us in a waiting room: we miss a story; a span of events; a collection of moments that are the tesserae of the mosaic of a thing’s existence. A leaf’s existence, like a human life, begins with a birth and a period of development, reaches its peak of productive capacity, and inevitably faces a gradual decline into non-being.

A budding leaf

Birth

            After a winter of dormancy, spring’s warm temperatures reactivate a tree’s growth hormones, a process that leads to the begetting of a leaf. As water and minerals flow from the roots of the mother-plant, millions and millions of cells erupt from the meristem—the source of leaf’s élan. As the building blocks assemble, they form a bud from which a young leaf sprouts into spring air. Its nutrient-filled veins spiral away from its midrib—the central highway of the leaf’s terrain. These water-filled lifelines connect every building block of a leaf’s being to the very roots of the tree from which water travels upwards, as if defying gravity. Even though the young patch of green is just one of the many on the tree, it is entirely unique: winding pathways of the leaf’s travel-network form an intricate pattern that no two leaves share; like ridges of a fingerprint, the composition of veins and midrib distinguishes the leaf from all others.

Such marvels of a young leaf’s conception, however, take place entirely underappreciated by our greater culture. Unlike the flowers, serenaded by poets from the moment those “darling buds of May” fancy making an appearance, a leaf bud comes to being unobserved, unappreciated, and unwelcomed. Such a selective poetic interest that exults over flowers but overlooks leaves, demonstrates that even our post-Romantic world sometimes succumbs to romantic sensibilities. We conceive of the spring as a season of flowers, overexcitedly going along with Schiller’s personification of spring as “nature’s darling,” carrying a “basket full of blossoms” (2-3).[1] A cultural high, however can only be followed by a low of a grievous mourning when the flowers die. Indeed, the spike in suicides that coincides with the transition from flowering to leafing time has for long puzzled scientists. As Emily Dickinson notes, “A quality of loss / Affecting our Content” permeates the spring season, a mood that we owe to our Romantic heritage that is oblivious to the beauties of nature’s circle of life in which a flower’ death is a leaf’s birth and a leaf’s death is a flower’s birth (17-18).[2]

Perhaps our sadness is not entirely due to romantic flimsiness but rooted in a deeper, internal existential concerns that we project onto nature’s colorful spring pallet. Robert Frost describes the sorrow at the fleetingness of spring’s blooming buds as a loss of “gold:” “Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay” (5-8).  In these lines from “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” the loss of golden spring flowers that makes room for leaves stands as a metaphor for the transience of all things “gold”—things, supremely good and valuable to us. The passing of time, however, is not to be fought, but accepted; that “nothing gold can stay” is not an exclamation of pain, but rather a calm statement of fact. Such is the nature of being; c’est la vie; the only constant is change. In “The Trees” Philip Larkin recognizes such truths by embracing the emergence of young leaves as a mournful reminder of life’s temporality that nevertheless holds a promise of a new opportunity: “Last year is dead, they seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh” (11-12).

Spring’s speedy shift from colorful to green paradoxically makes us recognize both the fleetingness of valuable moments and the freshness of a new beginning. In T. S. Eliot’s words, spring goes about “mixing Memory and desire,” memory of the gold lost, and desire to gain it anew (2-3).[3] Amidst this mélange of emotions that beauty’s ephemeral nature awakens in us, however, we risk missing out on a small budding leaf commencing its existence.

 

A leaf's unique network of veins

Peak

            From the very moment the first green of the leaf makes contact with the sun’s gold, the leaf begins to fulfill its vocation by repaying its mother-tree’s beginning investment; it becomes a unit of production, a worker providing the tree with sustenance. The leaf produces in a seemingly magical process of photosynthesis, magical because at face value the leaf appears to be putting together—synthesizing—from nothing but light—photo (coming from Ancient Greek φῶς—phôs, meaning “light”). The processes’ mystical etymology and appearances, however, do not exactly correspond with the truth—the leaf indeed synthesizes, but it uses more than mere light to do so. Light provides the energy for the leaf to combine water it procures from the mother plant and the carbon dioxide that it inhales from the air. The synthesis of the two compounds yields some oxygen—a side product that the leaf disposes of, and glucose, a sugar molecule supremely valuable to the tree. Every single living cell of the mother-tree relies on glucose for its life; hence, glucose is the leaf’s gold. By forming glucose, the leaf feeds itself and lets the extra make its way back to the leaf’s mother-tree. The leaf’s entire morphology accommodates this productive process: with its flat, thin shape the leaf simultaneously maximizes the “sun-catching” area and protects its bottom-layer breathing cells from the sun’s harsh glare; the leaf’s glossy upper-layer ensures that as little water as possible evaporates from the delicate and exposed network of veins; and even the leaf’s green color is due to the green pigment’s success at absorbing the sun’s golden light.

            Despite such a deceptively standardizing description of leaf’s vocation and morphology, each leaf’s career is its own story. The precise amount of glucose a leaf will produce in its day, its month, or its lifetime depends on factors such as its location on the tree, the success of its neighbors, and light conditions of the productive season. A leaf is both one of the many and an entirely exceptional unit; neither aspect of its dual being can or should entirely escape our discourse. When we say we are “turning over a new leaf”—an expression referring to book pages which were once very aptly called leaves—we cannot deny that our new leaf is one of the many—it is just another page of a book. And yet, it is a new leaf. Ripe with opportunity and unwritten on, a brand-new book leaf carries in it all the potential of the space that words can fill. A tree leaf alike, while being only a single unit of production in an emblematic labor-extracting factory, will throughout its lifetime perform synthetizing actions in a rhythm non-identical to any other of its neighbors. No two days of leaf’s being are the same to each other or to any of its fellows; the wind engages it in constant movement, the rain hits its surface, and the clouds passing determine the amount of light that will play a role in a leaf’s production cycle. A leaf exemplifies that nature at every level of inspection, rather than being constant and static, is a dynamic constellation of multitudes.

            Because a leaf is so enclosed in multitudes of its grander and smaller categories, we can hardly view it in isolation from them. If a lightning from a summer storm strikes a tree, a leaf will wither away in a couple of days. If a bacterial or viral infection gains access to a tree’s circulatory system, it will devour a leaf from within. Alternatively, if sick insects or mites gnaw on a leaf, an entire tree may fall ill as a consequence. As a unit of nature, a green leaf is wholly subject to nature’s merciless proceedings. If a deer can reach a leaf, its tree will do nothing to save it. If a leaf’s connection to the branch grows weak or is weakened by gnawing animals, the wind or rain will prematurely detach it from its life-source. And let’s not forget at a broad variety of human intervention which may crush a leaf’s productive era at its peak by ruthlessly tearing off a leaf on a low-lying branch, sawing off a branch, or tearing down an entire tree. Not every leaf gets a peaceful retirement. A leaf that does live through its productive days unperturbed, however, takes part in a perplexing process of gradual decline.

 

A sick leaf

Fall

            Those first few chilly autumn days mark the beginning of a leaf’s end. Lowered temperatures activate a cocktail of hormones in the mother-tree that commences the process of abscission. The word abscission is etymologically indebted to the Latin verb scindere, meaning “to cut,” and indeed, the process figuratively and literally entails cutting. Figuratively, a leaf gets more than just cut off: its mother tree not only ceases sending it sustenance, but also extracts from its faithful worker any molecule it can break down for nutrients. The green pigment, so vital in the productive cycle of glucose, is the first to be called back by its maker. In its absence, red and yellow pigments, once invisible, now glow in full and short-lived glory of autumn foliage. After such a cold termination of the leaf-tree business relationship, the mother-tree literally begins to cut off the leaf: it orders the growth of special abscission cells at the base of the leaf’s stem, cells whose only job is to little by little weaken the leaf’s connection to its mother-tree, until the leaf finally breaks off.

            A leaf’s autumnal fall is a curious matter. For one, it marks a momentous occasion of the severing of a bond between the leaf and its source. The mother-tree carefully nourished the leaf and lived off its productive capacities for months only to heartlessly shed it in preparation for winter. The leaf’s abandonment, however, marks also its liberation. Months upon months after its conception, the leaf fluttered, shook, and trembled with the tree, one with its maker up high. As it flutters so elegantly downwards, however, it takes upon a new being; it becomes a physically independent thing, a thing no longer a part of a larger organism. A leaf’s journey to the ground marks its death, but also its emancipation. Its fall is the single longest, most exciting voyage a leaf will ever take; it is the leaf’s solitary act of realizing its potential, an event that creates tangible kinetic energy of movement from merely conceptual, potential energy. A leaf’s fall is a fall from the state of being a living organism, dependent for its every move and breath on a grander entity, to the state of being biologically dead, yet for the first time existing as its own thing.

   

A falling leaf

Decay

A leaf’s new state of existence begins as unceremoniously as its begetting. Amongst a host of colorful falling foliage, the odds are in the favor of a leaf making its journey all the way to the ground undisturbed and unobserved. Once green, soft, and supple, the fallen leaf is now a shade of dust—red, brown, orange and undeniably earthy. Its building blocks that water pressure once kept plump and nimble are now mere dried out shells, coarse to the touch, loosening its bonds in preparation for disintegration. A leaf’s glorious liberation set a timer on leaf’s existence—it is only granted however long it takes for its building blocks to give out and crumble under the pressure of natural forces. The first ones to go will be the ones furthest away from the leaf’s thickest veins. If left to lie on the forest floor, a leaf’s disintegration will be remarkably peaceful, a mere letting go of connections that once held it together. At a certain point, only the life-network of the leaf—its veins and midrib, will keep it together; like the ribs of an umbrella or a human skeleton they will proudly show off the structure of the leaf. The decaying building blocks will lie between the veins, one with the background, too weakened by the lack of life to partake in the leaf’s being. Gradually, the veins too will give way and crumble…then the midrib…

It is hard to point at a precise moment when a leaf ceases to be a leaf. Especially if its resting place is a peaceful nook in the forest ground where it lies undisturbed by anything other than the occasional rain. If left to lie, a leaf may appear leaf-like for long after its parts stop holding on to each other. A leaf’s journey into non-being is a gradual becoming one with its surroundings, a slow union with the leaves and earth around it. Depending on the weather conditions, a leaf may reach a point of non-recognition in as little as a couple of days or as long as a year or two if winter engulfs it in an icy armor. In a city, a leaf is taken to a compost facility where it is tossed and turned with others in an effort to turn it in a non-leaf as quickly as possible. Regardless of the leaf’s fate, however, its end state is that of an unceremonious union with nature. Its corpse will nourish new life that will grow new leaves when spring comes once more.

 

A decaying leaf

Turning Over A New Leaf

            Considering how touching, relatable, and intricate a life-journey of a tree leaf is, are we at all capable of reforming our attitude towards a leaf, a thing that is so unreasonably ignored? Gerard Manley Hopkins in a poem “Spring and Fall” unknowingly discusses this precise question as the poem’s speaker unfolds the reasons behind a young girl’s mourning over falling autumn leaves. The speaker views the girl’s sadness as a sign of genuine connection with leaves, a connection worthy of a much more significant thing than a mere leaf: “Leaves like the things of man, you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?” (3-4). He marks her grievances as a sign of youth and foretells she will cease feeling for the leaves as surely as she will mature into adulthood: “Ah! as the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder” (5-6). Readings of this poem have reveled in how skillfully the speaker extrapolates an elevated grievance for human mortality or from the little girl’s simple mourning: “It is the blight man was born for / It is Margaret you mourn for” (14-15). But what if little Margaret mourns not for herself and humanity? What if she genuinely feels for the falling leaves because she recognizes their existence, their beauty, and their fleetingness? Ah! Growing older must be such an awful thing if it turns us blind to an entire universe of existence right outside our doorsteps. We grow out of having time to observe the leaves. We grow out of marveling at them. We grow out of feeling for them.

Let us mourn for the Margaret we lost, the Margaret who dared look at a leaf, recognize its existence, and feel sorrow at the death of a leaf—a thing unlike any that has ever existed and unlike any that will ever exist.

---

[1] Friedrich Schiller: “To The Spring”

[2] Emily Dickinson: “A Light Exists in Spring”

[3] T. S. Eliot: “The Waste Land”