Shedding Rain

The generous conjugations of leaves

This is my column for the fall 2024 issue of Arnoldia, a quarterly magazine about the nature of trees, which I edit at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. The piece has its roots in an audio post I shared here a couple of years ago. The print issue of Arnoldia hits the mail next week.

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A few years ago, September brought a hurricane that broke apart along the whole of the east coast. As the first fronds of the storm stole inland, I lay awake in the early hours and listened to the rain sluicing down the shingles, funneling through foliage, puttering on the paving stones. There is a quiet and accessible doorway to utopia in this: all of us breathing in the dark, lying still, a vast alone-togetherness beneath the weather’s comprehensive intimacies. And then I thought of the leaves in the rain, each one alive and on the brink of a fall.

Earlier that summer, we had decided to put up a shed in our backyard. It came in a kit, all the pieces precut. It was supposed to look like a log house with a slant roof in lean-to style. The wood arrived untreated, and the manufacturer recommended staining it right away to keep the wood from weathering. The rain came a few days into the project, with the doors not yet hung, the shingles still waiting to be put on the roof.

The sky brightened but the rain increased, clattering down like showers of coins through the high trees. I got out of bed to see what I could do about the unfinished shed. Halfway down the stairs, I stopped at the window looking out on our tiny side yard, where a volunteer redbud had grown into a sprightly tree fifteen, maybe twenty feet tall. I’ve spent a lot of time under this tree, which partly shades a hammock on the patio. On a sunny day with the canopy tiling overhead, the shadows of higher leaves project on the lower ones, making silhouettes of leaves within leaves, a dappling dance of emptiness and form. And the leaves themselves luminous, strobing, elementally green. How much light, this marvelous green light of earth, the leaves let pass! Of course, these are the wavelengths they don’t use in photosynthesis. Still, whenever this leafy light is upon me, whether swinging in a hammock or walking through the landscape, it strikes me as a boon I’ve done nothing to earn, and never could refuse—which is to say, a kind of gift.

So it was September, and I was standing on the stairs now looking down on the leaves, and the rain was falling, and I noticed how all the leaves were cupped: the heart-shaped, entire blade of each leaf had tensed upward and inward, like when you put your hands together to catch water from a faucet, with the midrib where your pinkies touch. And here’s the thing: they weren’t wet. It was raining, raining hard, but the leaf surfaces were neatly beading the water. A leaf would bounce when the water hit it, and the water would settle into a gelid bead of glassy reflections, plumply poised on the leaf’s dry palm. As rain continued to fall, the droplets would multiply, coming together in an instant, blip, doubling up and doubling up and doubling up, until a single bead of water grew heavy enough, and the cupped hands of the leaf would dip, and the water would roll off like a marble; and through all this juggling of water, the leaves, like the hands of a magician, remained visibly dry.

I asked my colleague Michael Dosmann about this trick of botanical hydrophobia; he told me that it’s called the “lotus effect,” explaining that at nanoscopic scales a leaf’s cuticle is studded with waxy asperities, microcrystalline projections, which can repel water and prevent it from wetting the leaf surface. Surprisingly, it’s the roughness of this micro-topography that lets the droplets roll so smoothly, as it provides little purchase for the water to adhere. Picking up particles of dirt, the rolling waterdrops clean the leaf surface, and perhaps help to flush away pathogens, too, in a process called “self-cleaning.” It seems fair to ask, though, who is cleaning whom?

Since the mid-twentieth century, the self-cleaning efficacy of the lotus effect has inspired materials scientists to develop industrial and commercial applications, resulting in a dizzying variety of paints, coatings, films, fabrics, and laser-sculpted metallic nano-surfaces. (Not all these gifts of biomimicry are benign; the formulation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forevever chemicals” now linked to a variety of ailments, also was inspired by the lotus effect; of course, we can’t blame this poisonous gift on the leaves.) But the salience of the phenomenon is ancient: in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna advises Arjuna that “one who performs his duty without attachment… is unaffected by sinful action, as the lotus leaf is untouched by water.”

In that September rain, I wasn’t thinking about nanotechnology, or trichomes, or alkyl chains. I watched the leaves receiving the rain, rolling it into drops, and bowing, bowing here and there as they shed these gifts to fall. I thought of the prayerful hand posture practiced in many yogic and Buddhist traditions, the Anjali mudra, hands held together, fingertips to fingertips, palms gently cupped. Anjali: “divine offering” in Sanskrit. And I remembered how the late scholar Helen Vendler, who spent childhood days adventuring in the Arboretum, caught in her study of his Sonnets the way Shakespeare sometimes conjugates the verb “to love”: loving, leaving, leafless. Vendler calls this Shakespeare’s “law of nourishment and consumption.”

I stayed on the stairs for some while with the leaves dipping and bowing, the loving water leaving the soon-to-be-leafless tree. And then the spell broke, and I ran outside to throw a tarp over the unfinished shed.

I am writing this now in another rainstorm, sitting on the porch next to the redbud tree, watching the rain bead and fall from the leaves. Rainfall and the song of crickets, that autumnal counterpoint. The leaves are not the same old leaves, of course, though as the season advances, neither are they new. Again, the gemlike water beads, conjoins, and slides away. Each leaf is mapped with its own constellation of droplets, more numerous than I remember, though I’m sure these leaves know better than I how many droplets their offering takes.

The shed has withstood many rains, and with many more to come, already it’s streaked with the lacings of fungal growth. Years or decades from now, someone else likely will see it as a trouble to take down. Performing their duties without attachment, the leaves soon will fall, and then new leaves will come, resilient and ephemeral, to renew their gifts. I want to learn from the leaves.

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I’m excited to share the fall issue of Arnoldia, which includes a mind-opening visit to the site of an Aztec botanical garden, bracing accounts of the deep and troubled histories of landscapes in the UK and the American South, and a feature from the visual artist Kyle Browne cataloging her landscape-based, tree-entangled work. To subscribe, join the Arnold Arboretum, and we’ll send you the issue today.

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“I’ve mentioned this before, the way certain landscapes seem to enhance certain wisdom texts, like reading Lao Tzu in a temperate rainforest is just a great read: there’s so much kind of moisture and water imagery and the valley spirit and all these things in Lao Tzu.” Novelist David James Duncan in conversation with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee of Emergence. They speak chiefly of Duncan’s recent novel Sun House, which has been hanging out mid-pile on my night table for a few months; this interview has got me pulling it to the top. (It also makes me want to find a wisdom text and a landscape and put them together, soonest.)

I’ve been entranced by the ungainly grace of this performance by the collective Men! Dancing!, set to a haunting choral arrangement of Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar.” The music is derived from Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter Rani Arbo’s rich setting. The latter, along with this version of Jason Molina’s “Whip Poor Will” from the album Magnolia Electric Company, have been on close-cycling repeat for me the last couple of weeks; they go together like goldenrod and aster.