It’s leaf raking season.

Our three cherry trees dominate the garden in all ways, including in leaf production.

When we moved in I thought of them as two trees and a young one. In the 10+ years we’ve been here, the young one has doubled in height and can no longer be discounted. Initially I found it superfluous – how many cherry trees does one need in a garden, anyway? But when the old one in front of the house lost several large roots and branches (when we had to replace the incoming water pipe) I realized that it won’t last forever, and it’s not a bad thing to have another tree in reserve. Especially when it’s there for free, and all we have to do is rake the leaves away.

I’ve always suspected that the young one has grown from a root sucker from the other tree in front of the house. I’m pretty sure the previous folks living here didn’t intentionally plant it; they didn’t plant anything, apart from a badly planned hedge. But now the large tree has dropped all of its leaves, while the young one still has nearly all of its leaves, so they seem quite independent of each other after all. I would have expected them to be more co-ordinated if they shared part of the root system. But that’s just my naïve intuition, thinking of their roots as akin to a network of blood vessels. They could of course be connected anyway but just not signal each other that much.

The amount of leaves these trees produce is astounding. The tree is still full of leaves, but somehow it’s already managed to cover all the ground beneath it.