Try reciting a few of them aloud: Glossy Privet and Cockspur Thorn and Sawtooth Oak and Folgner's Whitebeam and Fireberry Hawthorn and Bigleaf Snowbell and Lowland Ribbonwood and Meliosma myriantha.
They sound like a roll call of great estates nestled deep in remote forests, perhaps, or in the case of that last one, like the name of some exotic princess, snatched by fairies in fulfillment of an ancient curse. Just imagine — beneath a full moon on a chilly autumn night, naturally — the cries of her heartbroken suitor: "Meliosma Myriantha!
Come back to me!"
Clearly, I have lost my head and am swooning under the spell of "The Book of Leaves," a new publication from the University of Chicago Press. This big, beautiful, shiny, sumptuous and informational volume will enhance your appreciation of the natural world, but it does something else as well. It reminds you that wonderful things are often right under your nose.
The most familiar entities — in this case, the leaves on the trees — often are the most enchanting, but we overlook them because they're so common. So ordinary.
Autumn is the season when leaves attract more attention than any other, but that's rather a backhanded compliment. We notice them only because they're ready to depart. It's like visiting an elderly uncle for the first time in a long while after he's taken to his deathbed. Nice of you, but a little late, don't you think?
"In spite of their importance to life, their abundance ... leaves are perhaps the least appreciated part of a tree," writes Allen J. Coombes, author of "The Book of Leaves." They enable us to know which tree is which, and they can be pretty. Oh, but there's more: Leaves are the engines of photosynthesis. To put it simply — and Coombes does a lovely job in his brief, lucid introduction of explaining the process — they turn sunlight into energy, after which they crank out the oxygen that is essential to life on Earth.
In its 656 pages, "The Book of Leaves" details, leaf by leaf by leaf, 600 trees and the "vegetative outgrowths from the stems of plants" — the technical definition of leaves — they produce.
The leaf of each tree is unique from that of other trees. And thus, you discover the stunning variety of shapes and sizes and colors and textures in these flimsy, floppy things that dangle from trees, that sway in the breeze, that shrug off raindrops and join with their brethren elsewhere on the plant to form a twitching, shade-bestowing phalanx.
Coombes and his editor, Zsolt Debreczy, provide the informal name of each tree as well as the scientific moniker. The informal ones are often whimsical — there is the Wedding Cake Tree on page 126, for instance, found in China, Korea and Japan — while their formal names are somewhat less so: Cornus controversa, in the case of the Wedding Cake Tree. The leaves of this tree, by the way, are elliptical, dark green on top and gray underneath, and in the fall, turn yellow, red or dark purple.
Another tree bears a name that sounds like a fungus you don't want to find between your toes: Quercus myrsinifolia, also found in Asia, which produces a slender, demure leaf. Another sounds like a crunchy candy: "Winter's Bark," an evergreen that makes its home in Chile and Argentina and features a long, leathery leaf that smells pleasantly spicy when rubbed between your fingers.
Even the trees that are boringly familiar to us — the oaks, maples, chestnuts, willows, birches and magnolias — seem exciting when the individual leaf is considered, when its shape and habit and peculiarities are explained. The leaf of the Blackjack Oak looks like a ghost jumping up and crying, "Boo!" The leaf of the White Mulberry looks like a dowager queen sporting an ornate bustle.
And the leaf of the Pacific Willow found, naturally, in California — is as skinny as an actress strolling along Venice Beach.
Coombes, coordinator of the Herbarium and Botanic Garden at the University of Puebla in Mexico, and Debreczy, research director of the International Dendrological Research Institute in Boston, have created something that is much more than a mere reference tome.
"The Book of Leaves" is bursting with beauty and facts, with the vigorous eccentricity of nature leavened by the somber classification requirements of botanical study.
It is also, I predict, Kindle-proof: That is, you can't imagine reading it on a little screen and turning virtual pages. It needs to be spread out on a kitchen table, preferably with a couple of kids hovering nearby, so that you can all marvel at the colors and shapes that have been here all along, hidden in plain sight.
Leaves serve us and save us and now, thanks to "The Book of Leaves," we can appreciate how they turn the world itself into an art museum. Admission is free. You just have to look — and be willing to see
