Strange Leaves on Stranger Trees
Leaves crackle under my feet as we walk on the trail. Newly fallen, they create a crisp carpet that stretches through the woods. On a mat of pine needles, lie all kinds of oak leaves. Here, with its rounded lobes looking like so many fingers, is a leaf from a white oak. I pick it up and trace its outline: pinched at the bottom, getting vase-like larger toward the middle before quickly compressing back to its rounded tip. If oak leaves had figure-types, would the white oak be an apple?
Near the white oak is a pretty red leaf resting on a bed of moss. The delicate pointy lobes have often confused me: does it belong to a pin oak or a scarlet oak? The sharply cut leaves of these two oaks look so similar; each time we walk in the woods, I come equipped with a little more information to distinguish between the two. I count the lobes on the leaf, having learned that the scarlet oak has 7 to 9 lobes, while the pin oak has 5 to 7. This one and the next few I count seem to end right in the middle at seven, leaving me none the wiser. Some branches of a nearby tree come charging down, evidence that there are indeed pin oaks here, but there are other oak trees here as well, and so I have no confirmation if what I now hold are indeed pin oak leaves. I fall back on my instinct. There always appears to be some perfection about scarlet oak leaves: precisely cut lobes arranged in tight symmetry about a central axis. The ones around me seem looser and carefree, one lobe cut more deeply, another merging with an adjacent one, as if nature delegated the task of cutting to a young Edward Scissorhands still in training. A pin, my instinct nudges me. A few steps ahead and I meet some leaves of a red oak. It has the same pointed character as the other two, but these leaves look more sturdy, fuller toward the middle, very unlike the precariously cut lobes of the pin and scarlet oak that threaten to tear the leaf apart.
I scour the forest floor, going uphill, searching for leaves which I have only seen before in these woods, until I finally spot one and then another and many more. I would not have even known that these came from an oak tree if a friend had not kindly identified it for me. Now its very coarse bark and bluntly toothed leaves jump out at me. This is the chestnut oak, named after the chestnut tree, whose leaves it is said to resemble. I may not have the fortune of knowing the American chestnut, which has long since disappeared, but am glad to have been introduced to its look-alike. The chestnut oak is a new friend: the newest among the many oaks that I have met.
I catch myself smiling, amused that I can even distinguish between different kinds of oaks. This has been a good day to come and bid these leaves adieu until the next year. A few weeks later, and they will start to disintegrate, one form melding into another, until it is all an indistinguishable mass: as indistinguishable as they all appeared to me several years ago, when everything was a blur of green.
Beech, oak, hemlock: these were just words to me, words from fairy tales and imagined lands. I had drawn holly leaves on Christmas cards, but it was just a pattern for a holiday we did not celebrate. I had read mystery books about monks who poisoned each other with hemlock but did not know if that was a tree or a flower. But there were trees which I knew intimately. I had climbed up a frangipani, and turned its flowers into rings for my fingers, inhaled and held my breath so that I could forever capture the fragrance of a champak flower within me, scanned a tamarind tree anxiously for ghosts, and laughed at the fruits of the cannon ball tree. Those trees had names, characters and stories that were a part of me. Now I was surrounded by a foreign mass of green: trees I didn’t know that followed a rhythm of seasons I did not understand.
It was lonely, being among strange people and stranger trees. I did not know what a perennial was, and was flummoxed by bark mulch. I shrugged when people expressed their love for elms and mentally rolled my eyes when they discussed the merits of different evergreens. Sure, I learned to sputter out whether a viburnum had alternate or opposite leaves, and even the merits of different kinds of mulch: but these were just words, knowledge shrouded in both ignorance and apathy. When you can barely tell apart an oak from a maple, it is so much easier to generalize, strange trees. So much easier to simplify, and even appear knowledgeable among friends who knew still less than I did. Quercus alba, Quercus coccinea, Quercus rubra: they were just names to be memorized in order to pass an exam. Just oaks, just trees. I looked around with stranger’s eyes, and all I saw were strangers.
It took several walks in the woods to even really see a tree. To recognize an oak, any oak among that mass of trees. To then see the rounded fingers of some oak leaves and the pointy lobes of others. To sense the lightness of a pine forest and the somberness of the hemlocks. To experience the joy of spotting a witch hazel in bloom in fall, its tiny yellow flowers peeping out in between the yellow leaves. To feel the rough bark of an oak tree on one’s hands. It is so much easier to peep into a forest and only see the blur of trees, so much easier to assume that all trees are the same. And so much harder to do so once you get introduced to the differences.
I know a little more each time we go on our weekly hike and bring back with me the discovery of something else that I do not know. Many things still flummox me, but I am less wary. Just when I thought I knew a red oak, a kind friend introduces me to a black oak, letting me know how easy it is to confuse one with the other. My books tell me that unlike the red oak, the black oak leaves are fuzzy or velvety underneath: new information to take with me on our next hike. I hope I get to meet a black oak soon.
It takes time to get to know a stranger; I catch an oak leaf that comes swirling down from a tree, and am glad I gave it that time.
