As winter approaches and the growing season ends, trees withdraw many of the proteins and nutrients they have stockpiled in leaves back into their woody tissue, so that these nutrients can be recycled to make new leaves the following year. However, most trees are able to do even better than this- after their leaves have fallen, the nutrients that couldn’t be recaptured in time are decomposed into the surface soil surrounding the tree, and will be available for uptake through the roots several years later. This regular flux of plant essential nutrients back to the soil through leaf litter means that plants depend on those same nutrients, year after year, to grow new leaves.

In fact, if you look at the typical architecture of a deciduous tree, it is no accident that probably appears like two umbrellas attached together at their handles. The top umbrella is the above ground parts of a tree from the base of the trunk to its canopy. The bottom umbrella is inverted and planted into the ground. It is composed of a main taproot that drives straight down into the earth, and lateral roots that branch out horizontally. Of these lateral roots are branching networks of finer and finer “root hairs” and associated fungi that are able, through their enormous surface area, to mine the soil underneath a tree for nutrients. Everything that is dropped from the top umbrella should theoretically be recoverable by this root system.

I’d imagine most of you can already see where this is going, but I find that sometimes simple truths are quite elusive. When we rake our leaves in the fall to maintain our clean, grassy lawns, we are removing loads of nutrients that our trees are expecting to get back! We are creating an artificially open, leaky system, that trees have spent millions of evolutionary years refining. A recent paper in a relatively esoteric research journal, “Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems” (who reads that??) attempted to quantify the impact of historic leaf raking on old agricultural towns in central Europe. The fascinating bit of historical information in this paper is that centuries ago, medieval farmers actually knew that leaves were a great nutrient source- farmers removed leaves from nearby forests specifically to use as fertilizer on their fields. This paper claims that the result of historic leaf raking is that the “majority of central European forests were severely depleted of nutrients…when modern long-term rotation forestry became the dominant form of forest land use”.

So next fall, when you’re pulling out your rakes or enlisting your kids to do so for a few dollars, think carefully about your trees. In all likelihood, the average patch of suburban lawn is already so nutrient depauperate from numerous land use changes (deforestation, asphalt paving, over-fertilization, the cultivation of a monoculture of non-native grasses, to name a few) that removing a few leaves isn’t going to make a big difference. But if I’ve learned anything from Malcom Gladwell, it’s that little changes that add up to produce big effects, and if medieval Europeans were knowingly removing nutrients from their forests, I figured modern suburbanites should at least be aware.