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When the Leaves Begin to Turn: September: Sassafras

Take the leaves of the Sassafras, for example. You'll find on the very same tree -- on the very same twig, often -- a three-lobed leaf, several oval leaves, and a leaf popularly known as the "mitten" because it's shaped, for all the world, like one of those big, clumsy, comfortable mittens that you'll be wearing pretty soon when you bring in wood for the kitchen stove on a cold winter's day.

This playful habit of the Sassafras seems to be rather characteristic of the youth of the tree, for the mature trees' leaves are more nearly all of one pattern -- the lobed.

To be sure, you could never find two leaves exactly alike; not even if you had before you, to select from, all the untold millions and billions and trillions of leaves from the days of the Garden of Eden up to the present. Yet the leaves differ more on some kinds of trees than others. The Sassafras and the Mulberry take the prize in this respect, I suppose, but there are others almost as inventive. Take the Burr-Oak, for instance. The outlines of its leaves wander around in all sorts of eccentric ways; but always somewhere -- usually about the middle -- are two deep indentations, as if some of the invisible little leaf tailors that work in the woods had tried to see how near they could come to cutting it in two without actually doing it; for these deep cuts are on opposite sides of the leaf and reach nearly to the midrib! Only a tough, leathery leaf like the Oak could stand a thing like that. And these same little tailors evidently know it; for; in cutting out the relatively thin leaf of the Sweet-Fern, where the cuts also reach nearly to the midrib, they alternate so that the two cuts never come opposite each other; it's a cut and a leaf, a cut and a leaf, right and left, all the way. THE FUN OF LEARNING TO READ THE TREE LEAVES Yet, with all these apparent complications, it's truly remarkable how the great variety of leaves follow a comparatively few fundamental patterns -- "humming one tune to infinite variations," as Emerson says of the unity underlying all things.