So beautiful!  The crown of the year…don’t you think if some sort of future climate change meant that we stopped having autumn colours it would be a great sadness.  The whole character of the country would change, I believe.  For me there’s a hypnotic mood in looking at the leaves and trying to name the varied beauty.  The words can’t convey the crazy glory of the situation.  There are a lot of trees around.  The conifers provide a dark anchor for gold, crimson, scarlet, oak brown, mustard yellow, rose, interspersed with pale green holdouts.  As the season continues, leaves flurry down like doomed butterflies, like coloured snowflakes ironically foreshadowing what is to come. But every royal robe has it’s seamy side, after all.

A few acres of nicely wooded property magically accumulates a lot of fallen leaves.  Leaving it all to nature would mean in Spring a slimy black and heavy mess all over the land.  It’s a bit like a fairy story in reverse.  You start out with mounds of brilliant treasure and after a long snowy winter you end up with ……well, better to put on your cute hat, grab the rake and get into it.

Manage that magnificence.  Rake up the royal robes of Nature.  Crush the crown of the year with the riding lawn mower and turn that glory into mulch.  Caught between splendour and practicality…..the Canadian fall dilemma.