Before Georgia O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico and started painting bleached bones and ginormous flowers, she painted leaves… often autumn leaves. Her biographers tell us that autumn was her favorite time of year and that she took daily hikes at her Lake George home. Because O'Keeffe liked the rich colors and distinctive shapes, often — like 29 times — she painted overlapping leaves just the way she found them in the forest.
In Lake George, New York and throughout the temperate forests of North America, leaves do pile up, creating a colorful mulch beneath the trees.
Many of our native pollinating bees lay their eggs and provisioned their nests under the shelter of fallen leaves. Depending on the species, butterflies and moths spend the winter as eggs, caterpillars, pupae or adults and they too rely on fallen leaves for cover and to insulate them from the elements.
Bagging or shredding fallen leaves kills the very pollinating insects we strive to encourage.
Many environmental organizations and agencies now recommend we “leave the leaves” or at least rake or blow fallen leaves to garden beds… or to pile them around trees and shrubs… or move them to the borders and the corners of a property where they will shelter the pollinating insects, their eggs and even the land snails that will next spring provide the calcium enabling mother birds to lay eggs.
By utilizing the intact leaves as a mulch, you help the environment all while you observing the very designs of colorful, overlapping leaves that so intrigued the young artist Georgia O’Keeffe.
