The Panic Room

Below is the same tree, from a bit further away, yesterday.  Same date, three years later…some of its leaves are still green even as most have fallen to the ground.

 Here is a neighboring maple in 2010, a cascade of gold.

Every leaf looks battered, parched, and speckled with brown lesions.  The totally dead branch on the right below, however, is from the cicadas that emerged in most unimpressive numbers this year – not surprising that there were nowhere near as many as anticipated, since for 17 years they live in the soil, feeding on the roots of trees that have been shrinking from air pollution. The noisy insects are above ground only briefly to mate, and then the females lay their eggs at the tip of a branch, causing it to break and wilt early in the season.  By now those look black.

 Even the green leaves are spotted before they turn yellow.

There are still people saying the autumn foliage is glorious – I guess they’re just not looking very closely and/or, they have forgotten what it used to look like, not that long ago.

 At the entrance to the club, several red Japanese maples flank the gate, as seen in 2010.

The reason I stopped back then to take photographs is that the maples there were by far the most brilliant color I could find that year, and I wanted to record how beautiful they were before the plague got worse.

 Above are the best leaves that year – below are the worst.

 This is from yesterday:

 Below are the best leaves I could find:

 Here (other than those that had already shriveled up completely and fallen off) are the worst:

I see from your Saturday, November 9, 2013 All Lies and Jest that:  ”Éva, who is recording the smog and miserable trees in Budapest, Hungary (she describes the leaves there with the extraordinary term “mummified”)…” 

Right, just as in the past, I have used the terms embalmed, or tanned to describe abnormally dead leaves etc. 

You have seen, and wrote about, “bronze” or “rust” colored foliage. 

Most of the dead twigs, leaves, and leaflets look rusty or bronzed or russet, or resemble burnt copper. Many look like they have been caramelized, where sugars, or carbohydrates have likely been morphed — which is similar to the embalming or tanning chemical process where protein breakdown is suspended. 

“I” am positive that this all basic organic chemistry that botanists should know about… much air pollution has reactive volatile organic compounds that contact the organic foliage, and cause further chemical reactions within the cells and tissue of the leaves — and cause all manner of observable abnormalities.

The big pine tree that dominates the lawn at the USET is still limping along, but the groundskeepers must know it is not long for this world, because in the picture from yesterday, below, there is a newly planted replacement just behind it.

Here is the same maple, yesterday.  Same date, three years on.  Yes, it’s really still there, right in the center of the photo.

 Here’s a zoom of the top.  See all the red leaves? No?