Autumn Leaves

 Autumn Leaves (or Hojas de Otoño)

     The streets in our Colonia in Mexico City (Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec) are typically lined with trees. They nestle in amongst the houses. Their roots thrust up the concrete slabs of the pavement and gradually mould themselves to the spaces they have thus created. Their branches tangle with the myriad phone lines that still drape themselves from pole to pole and cluster round the high eaves of the apartment blocks. Where a protective iron railing once circled a young tree, now the tree has engulfed the iron; the smooth bark gently creeping round till it meets bark and fuses. 

     Trees here are valued for their shade, respected and preserved by common consent. If a trunk leans over the pavement the pedestrians step aside, or duck. If you want to roof-over the yard to make a new room, the tree remains in the centre of the new room, finding its way up through the roof, the terra cotta tejas pushed back each year and the floor slabs chipped to free the trunk. I have seen a tree that grows through an iron fence, and another the grows in line with a boundary wall, which obligingly curves out and round the tree. 

     Popular species include a thin-leaved ash (Fraxinus uhdei) that towers upward and throws a light and dappled shade. And a small-leaved weeping fig (Ficus benjamina), which forms a dense canopy and throws a deep shade, the roots of which, when given space, come welling up and over the pavement, writhing in slow motion. Also popular is the Liquidambar (Liquidambar styraciflua) with its three-pointed leaves, fine autumn colour and prickly fruit. You will find the occasional Purple-Orchid tree (Bauhinia blakeana) and the yellow-flowered Tulipán mexicano (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis), obviously planted for their flowers.  Occasional here, but magnificent elsewhere in the city, you can see the astonishing, jaw-dropping Jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia) whose lavender-coloured flowers in early spring completely cover the canopy. 

     Just now, in the last weeks of October, the streets are littered with fallen leaves, dry and yellow. For the Fraxinus and the Ficus, though evergreen, are also deciduous; the new leaves emerge even as the old leaves are falling. Housewives and caretaker are, for the next four weeks, repeatedly sweeping the pavement outside their property. I wrote before about the "Street sounds in our Colonia" but omitted to mention the gentle swishing sound that, night-after-night, I head from outside on the street; though puzzling at at 3 a.m., it turned out to be a night porter whiling away an hour or two of vigilance by sweeping his bit of pavement.