There are a billion microbes in a teaspoon of soil. Letting the leaves to Nature feeds and nourishes them... and blasting them with a leaf blower is disastrous

‘And now the leaves suddenly lose strength… New strong / Rain-bearing night-winds come,’ wrote Philip Larkin in a poem about autumn. ‘Leaves chase warm buses, speckle statued air, / Pile up in corners, fetch out vague broomed men / Through mists at morning.’

Larkin alone might have managed to make the appearance of a council worker — recently viral on video because he continued his leaf blowing in a gale — sound elegiac. We ‘vague broomed’ gardeners prefer to watch another year going quietly, holding a rake and pushing a wheelbarrow. This way we smell the earth at its warmest, wet and fertile. In this household, there are arguments about the extent of the mowing, but no question over the non-necessity of a leaf blower.

Common sense suggests that when authorities began to speak of leaves as ‘litter’ something went awry. The pleasures of leaf-raking are not merely nostalgic, they are practical, meditative and kinder to our neighbours, to creatures great and small. There is a job to be done. The National Trust is worried about ‘blockages’ and county councils must answer for flooded roads.

However, the RHS cautions that the pollution, disruption and noise of the power tool comes at a heavy price and should be avoided in private gardens. The standard engine of the leaf blower (and mowers) is the two-stroke, which is notoriously inefficient and filthy. As much as one-third of the oil and diesel remains unburned, blasted out into the air.

It is doubly unfortunate, therefore, that they tend to be used most in urban areas near schools and playgrounds. Although electric motors are replacing them, they will still noisily be scattering dust, plastic wrappers and goodness knows what all around us.

Gardeners need to consider daily how we tread, how generations have trod. As the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem says ‘…the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod’. Not only shod, but frequently shut up in a box on wheels, utterly divorced from the untold numbers of organisms that make up the earth beneath us. Earth is one-tenth organic matter, one-fifth macro fauna (think nematodes and worms) and the rest an invisible number of protozoa, bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi — one billion organisms to the teaspoon. There is suddenly a lot to read about soil and much to hope for its regeneration: I am gripped by the strange world of nitrogen-fixing and heavy-metal metabolising microbes.

Autumn is the time when this multifarious subterranean team takes on stores for the winter and next year’s growing season. Down below, life persists, prepares and protects. Leaves on the ground can reduce the surface compaction of soil caused by heavy rain. Be leaf lazy: leaves on the lawn or cluttering your beds and corners will be bedded down into the earth naturally by worms where they make humus, an ingredient that’s critical to soil health. It holds water and air together in pockets created by worm movement and generations of hyphae — the tiny looping threads and branching filaments of vegetative growths of fungi and related organisms that push through, making microscopic boreholes in soil. These mycelia are the biological link between root and soil, taking sugars from plants and delivering essentials such as phosphates up to them. Even when they die, they do good, leaving only a soufflé of air and water in the soil.

There is something timeless and miraculous in observing leaves and seeds being drawn down into a lawn by worms. The long, hard black beans of the catalpa trees down the drive here are randomly upended, then shortened and, finally, they simply disappear into the green sward, leaving me spell-bound. I imagine the lusty worm tugging on this girder-like pod with such determination from below. So much goes on in slow motion all around and beneath us. As you rake and stand, you might get to see it, even sense the telegraphic messages. Afterwards, you can lie in a hot bath and feel a lot better on several levels.