Nature Speaks

I gathered these six birch leaves because I was fascinated by the extraordinary patterns appearing across their surfaces. In some, the yellow veins branched through darkening tissue like little rivers; in others, the remaining green formed scattered islands amongst the ochre and brown. Although they belonged to the same autumn, each seemed to have arrived at its own particular arrangement of colours, as though the changing season had found a different way of expressing itself in every leaf.

As I worked in my journal, I found myself thinking about the difference between looking at something and attempting to draw it. There are details that scarcely register when we glance at a leaf but become impossible to ignore when we try to follow the course of a vein, understand the irregularity of an edge or find the precise place where one colour gives way to another. Drawing asks something different of our attention, although I am not sure that looking more closely necessarily brings us any nearer to understanding what we see.

We speak of autumn colour as though it were a single, familiar phenomenon, yet even these few leaves resist such a simple description. Some of their markings may have as much to do with damage or disease as with the changing season, and what appears beautiful to us may be evidence of processes about which we know very little.

I wonder how much of the living world disappears into the generalisations through which we learn to recognise it, and whether the things we believe we know best are sometimes those we have ceased to look at with any real curiosity.

Six leaves, one autumn, and the curious feeling that the more carefully I looked, the more there was to discover.