Falling leaves
As I walked out of the office one morning last week, I was struck by the sight that greeted me.
In the yard we seemed to have acquired a new mountain. Well, that is, of course, an example of hyperbole … it wasn’t exactly a “mountain” … here, the term is used to refer to a landscape which rises above 1500 meters above sea level – and the yard is too small to support such a structure. Yes, I was exaggerating – as the old saying has it, I was, sort of, “making a mountain of a molehill”, except that the structure I saw, at over a meter high and about two meters wide, was actually several times bigger than a molehill.
It won’t be there for long, however, not as long as if it were a real mountain.
It was a pile of autumn leaves.
In the small yard that surrounds our two storey building there are some 78 trees. Now, I could forgive you for thinking that’s another example of hyperbole … but it’s not an exaggeration. I went out and counted them in order to write this postcard. To be fair, some are quite small, being relatively young, but others are more well established and tower over the top of the building, blocking out the fierce sunlight and providing some welcome shade in summer.
In fact, Bishkek is known as the greenest city in Central Asia – and even as “the greenest city on earth” - with its numerous parks and tree lined avenues – a heritage of the early Russian settlers and military engineers who laid out the original city plan at the end of the nineteenth century. People like Aleksei Fetisov who laid the avenue that is now known as Prospect Erkindik, Oak Park and Karagachova Rocha – Elm Grove. There is also the Botanical Gardens which has over 2000 specimens of trees and shrubs and 8000 fruit plans including trees such as apple and plum.
In Autumn, however, trees have a feature that is less than welcome – they drop their leaves. Seven of them are fir trees, and so have no leaves to drop, but the others are all deciduous and so when autumn arrives, the leaves change colour and are shed by their parent tree and cover the ground.
I have to admit that when the colours change from the various shades of verdant green – I know, that’s a tautology – to a range of yellow, gold, brown and red, it makes a pleasant sight. It may not be as dramatic as compared to the fantastic range of colours that are found in New England, but during the autumn Kyrgyzstan is also ablaze with colours. One of the delights of my monthly trips to Naryn at this of the year is to see the rainbow of colours as we drive through the villages up to Issyk Kul.
This spectacle, however, comes at a cost as the leaves fall to the ground. There they lie, making the pathway slippery as they slowly decay. An important autumn task for gardeners all over the world is to clear them away.
One of my neighbours had risen early that morning and done just that. He had swept the yard clean. Not a leaf was out of place – they were all, either, still on the trees or had been swept up into this massive pile.
Bishkek