Jackie French: Look at Me! Trees

Unless you are a liquidamber tree. Or a persimmon. One night I went to bed and ours was a dull green. The next morning it had turned orange with just a tinge of red. Incredible, stunning on the tree and then falling in a neat ring of flagrant colour.

This is an extraordinary year for autumn colour.

According to authorities I tend to trust, the best autumn colour comes after a superb growing year. As the green ebbs from the leaves the other underlying colours are left, the ones masked by the green. The better the year, the better the others (if I have this wrong or vastly over-simplified do set me right). The others can mean the leaves appear red, orange, yellow, pink, purplish or just brown … and a combination of any of the above.

The best autumn glories have not only colour, but stickability. Golden poplars are stunning, but one frost and a gentle breeze wafts their leaves away. Scarlet or pinoaks will give you a rich red, and stick on the tree for months … but by that time the pinoaks are a miserable and persistent brown just when you don't want miserable brown staring you in the face.

Japanese maples are just about perfect for us: tiny trees, with leaves that begin orange, turn red and then the leaves just shrivel up and blow away, to settle in a corner where, yes, they must be cleaned up but it doesn't seem as bad as the claggy mess you get under, say, a plane tree.

Gingko is a favourite too. Heart shaped leaves suddenly turn butter yellow and flutter on their branches for at least six weeks, even if the wind begins to howl and they look like golden coins scattered on the grass when they first drift from the tree. Gingkos are stubborn, or at least ours is. Once again the leaves are small enough to shrivel to almost nothingness. Almost …

Then there is Claret ash, which begins bright red and deepens to a rich purple, and the Chinese tallow tree that friends say is reliable even in warmer areas. It is one of those trees that can be red, crimson, yellow, orange or all at the same time. And, of course, the apples … as we have over a hundred varieties, they turn yellow at slightly different times, giving us months of autumn colour as well as spring blossom. It would be more spectacular if they synchronised their colour changes, but I prefer vistas to views and the joy of wondering what will colour up next.

My most loved foliage tree here though is the native white cedar, or Melia azederach. It waits until every other deciduous tree had lost its leaves then turns bright yellow, the leaves staying glowing for at least a month before they fall, leaving bright red berries that the parrots adore. Of course that means that just as we think we have raked up all the leaves at last, we need to begin again – and these are not just leaves but stems. They take forever to break down, too – I pile other leaves to make next year's pumpkin and melon beds, but not the white cedar's.

Autumn leaves come just as you need them, a bright glory to end the growing year – and the promise of sculptured elegance of bare tree trunks to look through and past for winter and then entirely different beauty to come in spring.