The first cool mornings, the sweet rot of fallen apples, the sight of seed heads – these are all signs that autumn is here. But what happens when it starts coming earlier? When the floor is littered with burnt leaves, when the summer crops give up early and the flowers fade before all the pollinators get their fill? What has happened is a “false” autumn .
The leaves on the ground of your local park and pavements are not autumn leaves, where a deciduous tree has reclaimed as many valuable chemicals as possible from the leaf, so that the colours beneath are exposed, before sending it to ground. The extraction of pigments in a leaf is a slow process that takes trees several weeks, but the blast of extreme heat stole this from the plants and instead they had to slough off resources as they struggled to stay hydrated. These are the leaves we see right now: brown, curled and fried by the sun.
