FROM LEAF TO LEAF.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 133, 7 June 1932, Page 9

FROM LEAF TO LEAF.

GARDEN METAMORPHOSIS. BEAUTY OF THE WINTER. COLLECTING THE LEAVES. Fallen leaves are merely a source of annoyance to some people. To a person of any taste the leaf-etrewn sward in autumn is a thing of beauty, but the person that likes nothing but concrete paths and everything tidy and in its place, merely says, "Bother this rubbish; it takes me ail my time to keep the place clean." It seems impossible that anyone could fail to «ee the beauty of the old gold and brown carpet under an avenue of plane trees in autumn, or the pale gold flakes that come fluttering down from the cotton-woods in the Graf ton Gully, for instance.

Apart from their beauty the autumn leaves have a distinct value in the eyes of the gardener; he sees in them the stimulus to future generations of greenery and brilliant colour. When you see the gardener in the public parks carefully collecting the fallen leaves and putting'them into sacks you will know he i« not going to add them to the customary "bonfire that scents the air in the dead of the year with the unforgettable odour of wood smoke. The wise gardener hoards the leaves and Time turns them into one of the gardener's best assets —leaf mould.

Every leaf that falls has not the same value in the eyes of the gardener. The best leaf of all, he will tell you, ie the leaf of the English beech. There ie something solid about the beech leaf, something that gives it a "body" that is absent from the usual run of leaves. There are lots of beech trees in the public parks in Christchurch, but they are few-and far between in Auckland, and the gardener has to fall back on the next best, which happene to be the English oak. Up at the Auckland Domain gardens there is a receptacle where the oak leaves from the various parks are collected, heaped up and trodden down, and left to Nature. In the course of eight or -nine months ■• t'h&.-ingk 'pile-'"pf'

leaves will have dwindled down and consolidated in a remarkable manner for such light material. This partly decomposed heap is the leaf-mould that the gardener usee to coax the next generation of plants and flowers to vigorous beauty, and so the fallen leaves live again, never actually dying, 'but simply going through a metamorphosis in the same way that some creeds assign to human beings.