Waiting, waiting, waiting for the full autumn colours to get going. We need a bit of consolation. Seems incredible - not one of the many big American oaks has tinted up, and surely, at this time, in other years, they have been in full blaze by now. That's what you get them for. But then you read in an English newspaper that trees must suffer to produce great autumn colours. So says Professor Peter Davies, a British scientist working at Cornell University in New York State. "The more the tree is under physiological stress, the more colour will be developed," he says. "Thus, a dry summer, leading to drought stress, will probably give more colour in the autumn than a moist rainy one." In the forests around New York State, the leaves are now deep, deep yellows, bright oranges, absolute scarlets, deep purples and mauves. British trees look "a bit miserable by comparison."
Back in Ireland: normally those American oaks head the process, but now other trees and shrubs are leading them. The liquidambar is beginning to show purple. The Japanese maple has been going through its lovely routine of yellows and peach colour and is now shedding. Young beech show a bit of movement, but birch look a bit tatty here and there, but our own pedunculate oaks stay massively grave in deep, deep green. Shiny, too.
But one plant announces the season in its usual multi-coloured way. The cornus hedge is going through its unique range of colours. The lovely big leaves - and there are a lot of them, for the hedge stands about ten feet high and is nearly as broad, make their usual start with a mild lemony hue and then go through a symphony of colours ranging from the obvious red to an odd charcoal grey, or is it purple? Streaked, then covering the whole leaf. You walk along the drive and at every yard seem to find other variations. For your own satisfaction and to convince others, you try pressing the leaves between book pages. A few months later you find only a ghost of the leaf as it was. All muted now.
But one very young tree has been forgotten. The tulip tree with its curiously flat-ended leaves has taken on a look of toast, lightly done. But what, says some one, of the first-year American oaks mentioned here a few days ago as being of a Burgundy hue. They were in pots. And their brothers and sisters, so to speak, planted directly into the earth are still green. Trees are sent to make us think. Y