Reading the Season in the Trees

Autumn is the most generous time of year for anyone curious about trees. The canopy comes down to eye level in places, the low sun lights up bark that looks flat and grey in July, and every species announces itself in a different colour. A walk along a hedgerow or the edge of a wood in October can feel like reading a page of handwriting once you know the letters.

Colour also depends on the weather. A run of bright, dry days followed by cool — but not freezing — nights traps sugars in the leaf and produces the deepest reds and oranges. A wet, windy autumn strips the trees early and leaves you with a lot of brown. That is worth remembering when comparing one year with the next.

Oak: The Late, Heavy Bronze

Oak is usually the last of the four to turn, and it is rarely showy. Leaves shift from green through a dull gold to a deep bronze-brown, often curling and hanging on into December. You will often spot oak saplings and hedgerow oaks holding dead leaves right through winter, a habit called marcescence.

The leaf is easy: lobed, with rounded edges rather than points, and a slightly leathery feel. Look at the stalk to tell the two common species apart. Pedunculate oak has leaves with almost no stalk and acorns on long stalks; sessile oak is the reverse, with stalked leaves and acorns sitting directly on the twig.

Bark on a mature oak is deeply fissured, grey-brown, and ridged enough to look like weathered plough lines. It also carries more life than any other British tree — hundreds of insects, which is why you so often find holes, galls and nibbled edges. The acorn sits in a scaly cup, and this is the year to gather a few for planting in a pot on a windowsill.

Ash: Subtle Yellow, Distinctive Keys

Ash is disappointing if you are chasing colour and fascinating if you are chasing shape. Its autumn display is a weak, pale yellow, sometimes almost lime, and the leaves often drop while still greenish. It does not linger.

What makes ash unmistakable is the leaf: pinnate, with three to six pairs of leaflets plus one at the tip, arranged opposite each other along a central stem. The whole leaf can be 20–30cm long. In winter, look for the buds — velvety black and set opposite each other on the twig, quite unlike anything else in a British hedge.

Bark starts smooth and pale grey, then breaks into a diamond pattern of ridges, like the skin of a rhino. The seeds hang in dense bunches of winged keys, and a heavy crop — known as a mast year — is a sign of a tree under stress, which sadly fits a species still being lost to ash dieback across the country.

Beech: Copper, Silk and Winter Leaves

Beech gives the finest autumn colour of the four: buttery yellow turning to a rich copper-orange, and the whole tree seems to light up from the inside on a clear afternoon. Like oak, beech holds its leaves through winter when grown as a hedge, which is why beech hedges keep their structure and their russet tone until spring.

Bark is smooth, pale grey and often faintly striped, with a slight elephant-hide texture on older trunks. Leaves are oval, glossy, with a wavy, softly hairy edge — hold one up to the light and the parallel veins are clear.

Seeds are beech mast: small triangular nuts in a bristly, four-lobed husk that splits open when ripe. They are edible in small quantities but best left for the mice, jays and deer that depend on them. Badgers and squirrels will clear a mast crop within weeks.

Field Maple: Small Tree, Big Colour

Field maple is Britain's only native maple, and it punches well above its size. Leaves turn a brilliant butter-yellow, often flushed with red at the edges, and in a good year a hedgerow of field maple glows against the dark of the hedges behind it.

• Leaf: small, five-lobed and rounded, usually under 8cm across, on a long red stalk.
• Seed: paired wings set almost in a straight line, unlike the more angled sycamore.
• Bark: grey-brown with shallow fissures; young twigs often carry corky ridges.

That corky ridging on the twigs is the quickest giveaway if you are not sure. Run a thumb along a young shoot — if it feels like fine sandpaper with raised lines, you have field maple.

Making a Walk of It

Take a small notebook and pick one tree per walk rather than trying to identify everything. Collect a leaf, a seed and a bark rubbing on the same page, then note the date and the colour. Over three or four autumns you will build a record that makes the season feel like a familiar neighbour rather than a blur of brown.

Bring a little of it home. A jar of beech mast and acorns on a windowsill, a few pressed maple leaves between the pages of a book, a handful of dried oak leaves in a bowl by the fire — these small things do more for a room in October than any amount of decoration bought in a shop. The trees do the colour work for free; all you have to do is pay attention.