It was inevitable that something would happen between then (my last post) and now (the first week of December); even allowing for the mild weather due to climate change, the trees still have to do their thing and strip, losing all their leaves ready for their winter snooze so they can awaken and redress with fresh foliage in the spring.

Even if we do end up with erratic seasons, the old leaf/new leaf process has to happen.

But what we might find is that it happens at odd times as our climate fools the trees into thinking it’s time to strip and sleep when in fact it’s time to wake up and dress.

It’s a bit like waking your teenage son at the weekend; if you wake him on a Saturday as you would normally on a school day and tell him he’ll be late for school unless he shakes a leg, it’s a good way of getting him up and at ’em rather than rotting in his pit, but you may then find his confusion continues so that Sunday becomes Saturday and Monday Sunday.

So when I went to see what my apple sapling was up to, I expected his summer foliage to be gone as he made ready for his winter sleep; but I was rather surprised to see two brand new shiny green leaves that had emerged from his thin branches.

They are very new, very small and very fresh, they have that ‘just woken up and I’m ready to go’ look about them. But if my hunch is right and we’re in for a very cold winter with lots of snow, I can’t help but feel this unexpected surge of activity will be halted quite abruptly and not unlike my teenage son, I wonder if our sapling’s usual Spring waking time will now be confused and the energy he is putting into this lovely emerald green growth will reduce the energy he needs to survive winter and make ready to bounce back in the Spring.

Will he, like my son, think Spring is Summer, Autumn Winter and become a discombobulated apple sapling?

Of course I may be worrying unnecessarily and as with my son, he will go with the flow and continue in his own sweet way regardless of what is going on around him.

And as for his surrounds (the sapling not the son) the grass is now several inches tall due to the warm wet weather which means even the highest setting on the lawn mower ends up ripping chunks of grass out of the ground leaving bald muddy patches. In fact any grass cutting usually ends up as leaf collecting, given the lawn now has a brown toupee of leaf coverage.

There are also quite a few buttercup shoots around, suggesting its fibrous roots are probably matted and stretched all around as they creep across in stealth to secure more ground.

He can at least now see the sky on all sides as the trees in the adjacent copse are now bare so the winter sky is visible albeit through several thousand branches.

So notwithstanding the unexpected emergence of this new spring-like leaf and the impact climate change is having on nature, I am hopeful that our apple sapling will survive the ferocious winter I am anticipating (you heard it here first) by realising it is in fact winter (or in the case of my son, Saturday) and so can go back to sleep.