Raking season was a long drawn-out affair in 2017. Our yard trees didn’t start to shed fall foliage until mid-November, and even then it was a slow process — except for this one very proud oak. Year after year it refuses to shed its brilliance until long after all other trees stand bare in winter snow.
Marcescence, the term used to describe leaf retention, is most common with many of the oak species. Marcescent leaves are often more common with smaller trees or more apparent on lower branches of larger trees. In the case of smaller trees, which in forest conditions would be growing beneath taller trees, the reduced sunlight might slow the abscission process.
As very young children, my friends and I would spend fall days searching the woods near our neighborhood looking for what we thought were the perfect fall leaves. Later in the afternoon, after we had filled our buckets with all the leaves we had collected, we would run home to my house to spend the remainder of the day in my basement sorting through our leaves. Those leaves we each decided to keep would be pressed flat by stacking three or four Encyclopedia Britannica’s on top of each one of our *keepers*. The following weekend we would layer each leaf between two sheets of wax paper and iron our favorite leaves. We would then identify each leaf — oak, maple, elm.
A fun memory that might have stayed hidden had this article not made its way to my Facebook news feed. Many of my friends are quilters. Quite often a pattern they like will be shared, and at first glance I thought this was an advertisement for a quilting design. It wasn’t until I read the article that I understood this is actually a photo collage filled with individually unique leaves woven together in stunning detail — no one leaf is a duplicate of the other.
“My favorite thing in this project is that every leaf itself looks a bit interesting, but all leaves together look much more fascinating then one by itself,” explains Carola. “I had tons of photos. When I got through all the photos, I thought the project would be very boring. Leaf, leaf, leaf… oh hey, a leaf…”
The collages were her way of adding some much-needed diversity to the images… a story, if you will. “Eventually, as I compiled the collages from single pictures, I was happy with the result,” says Carola. “It wasn’t that boring anymore.”
Leaf collection has come a long way from early childhood days of wax paper preservation!
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