May 7, 2022
The Curse of Oak Leaves
It is a beautiful May afternoon. The wind is blowing the oak leaves in my backyard and I am sipping coffee and thinking about how much more raking I need to collect the leaves. The piles of oak leaves cover up my plants. Oak trees lose their leaves slowly through the Fall and Winter. I try to get the leaves collected before the snow covers the plants in the Fall. But, of course, cannot collect the oak leaves which fall over the Winter until snowmelt in the Spring.
Oak leaves come from the neighbor; we do not have any oak trees. We have other trees, the leaves of which had already fallen and been collected before snowfall.
Mind you, the leaves are large and beautiful in attractive hues but feel like leather. And that is why they do not crumple, even in time. They survive as whole leaves and cover the ground, killing the plants and vegetation under. So collecting them is a must if you want to keep your garden.
Now it is May again and lo-and-behold, there are still oak leaves in my yard.
When the neighbor moved in decades ago, they planted some sample trees, many oaks, along the perimeter of their yard. It sounded like a good idea. But trees grow and in decades the trees became mammoth.
For example, the ironwood in the corner next to us is over eighty feet tall. The lower branches were scraping and making a hole in my roof, so I had to hire people to take some branches off, which cost hundreds of dollars.
Before the contractor could prune the ironwood, he had to have the approval of the neighbor. So we marched over to the owner of the house next door and I talked with the woman whom we had known for a long time but never socialized with. Her husband died of cancer a couple of decades ago and she has not maintained her yard, nor pruned the trees. But she agreed to have her tree pruned, seeing the professional-looking t-shirt with a company logo, worn by the tree cutter. At any rate, I paid for the branch removal.
Another year, another cleanup of the oak leaves. Another few dozen bags later, I was getting mad: why do I have to clean up after the neighbor? The wind blows HER leaves into my yard. She should clean up. But she does not even clean up her yard except for a day in the Fall and a day in the Spring, hiring a contractor for the cleanup. Is there some bylaw that would require people to clean up their yard? And could such a bylaw be enforced? Or could there be a bylaw prohibiting the planting of oak trees on regular-sized, quarter-acre city lots?
Now I thought of talking with my neighbor when in a good mood and not upset with raking her leaves and perhaps trying to convince her to get her cleanup earlier and more thoroughly in the Fall and the Spring to minimize her oak leaves arriving in my yard. But I decided that would be useless; I chatted once with her before replacing an aging and ugly cedar hedge between us comprising tall poles denuded of green parts and even offered to pay for it, but she refused.
Another idea I thought of was to just dump the leaves back in her yard; they are her leaves. I thought about it and declined to act. She lives by herself and probably needs help. Who am I to give her more grief?
So I keep raking, bagging, and hoping that gypsy moths will enjoy the oak leaves this Spring and take care of my continuing frustration this year.
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