Rachises

Among our hardwood trees, the hickories are first group to drop their leaves. They turn a soft yellow—nothing dramatic, and no earlier than other trees, the birches and red maples, among them—and then, quite quickly, it's abscission time, as the hickories shed their leaves onto the fields, streams, and, of course, my lawn and driveway. But the show doesn't end there. All members of the tree genus Carya have compound leaves that are held aloft on a long twig—think of it as a spine—called a rachis, and once this structure has ditched its foliage burden, the tree cuts the rachis off from the fold and drops it as well. This shedding is less dramatic than that of the leaves, but if your path takes you by a hickory or another kind of tree with compound leaves, like a locust or a walnut, you can spot a tangle of ditched rachises on the ground. You might mistake them for pine needles... or fine bones. Look up: close by, you'll find a very bare and, to my eyes, forlorn hardwood.