No More Learning

Not only many in our towns have never witnessed it, but it is
scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.

Most appear to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they
were to confound ripe apples with rotten ones. I think that the change
to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a
late and perfect maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits. It is
generally the lowest and oldest leaves which change first. But as the
perfect-winged and usually bright-colored insect is short-lived, so
the leaves ripen but to fall.

Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it
commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less
nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth
through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So
do leaves. The physiologist says it is "due to an increased absorption
of oxygen. " That is the scientific account of the matter,--only a
reassertion of the fact. But I am more interested in the rosy cheek
than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on. The very
forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth, must acquire a bright
color, an evidence of its ripeness,--as if the globe itself were a
fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun.

Flowers are but colored leaves, fruits but ripe ones. The edible part
of most fruits is, as the physiologist says, "the parenchyma or fleshy
tissue of the leaf," of which they are formed.

Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its
phenomena, color, mellowness, and perfectness, to the fruits which we
eat, and we are wont to forget that an immense harvest which we do not
eat, hardly use at all, is annually ripened by Nature. At our annual
cattle-shows and horticultural exhibitions, we make, as we think, a
great show of fair fruits, destined, however, to a rather ignoble end,
fruits not valued for their beauty chiefly.
But round about and within
our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely
grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone.

October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes
round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a
bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting.
October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen
leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had
acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from
the green to the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly,
with paint, in a book, which should be entitled "October, or Autumnal
Tints,"--beginning with the earliest reddening woodbine and the lake
of radical leaves, and coming down through the maples, hickories, and
sumachs, and many beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to
the latest oaks and aspens. What a memento such a book would be! You
would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the
autumn woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves
themselves, unfaded, it would be better still. I have made but little
progress toward such a book, but I have endeavored, instead, to
describe all these bright tints in the order in which they present
themselves. The following are some extracts from my notes.


THE PURPLE GRASSES

By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps we are
reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted sarsaparilla leaves
and brakes, and the withering and blackened skunk-cabbage and
hellebore, and, by the riverside, the already blackening pontederia.

The purple grass (_Eragrostis pectinacea_) is now in the height of its
beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly.
Standing on a hillside near our river, I saw, thirty or forty rods
off, a stripe of purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a
wood, where the ground sloped toward a meadow. It was as high-colored
and interesting, though not quite so bright, as the patches of rhexia,
being a darker purple, like a berry's stain laid on close and thick.