There’s more to life than flowers, though flowers are absolutely wonderful. There are also leaves, the things that support both the plant and its flowers. Sometimes their perfection is stunning.

My grandparents, my father’s parents, had a large avocado tree in their back yard. It was almost two stories high and it’s branches and leaves curved over to the ground. As a boy I could sneak into the tree and out of sight. It was a strange place to be, because it was essentially hollow. There was a trunk and branches inside, but on the outside was a thin layer of thick leaves. They made the tree look enormous, but it was only an illusion. In actuality there was almost nothing there.

I could climb up the branches in the shade and in absolute privacy. If my grandmother knew what I was doing, I’m sure she would have yelled, “Get down from there.” But she saw nothing. I didn’t really think of avocados as food. There was no guacamole back then. At least not where we lived. It was easier to get Chinese food than Mexican food. And I honestly don’t remember anyone eating avocado. But I specifically remember avocado pits in the kitchen window in a cup of water supported by toothpicks, budding in the afternoon sun. There was always at least one in the window. None of them became avocado trees. My grandmother just like to mother them for a while, like she mothered all of us. My own mother did that a few times and lost interest. But my grandmother was always growing avocados in the window.

The insides of hedges are very much like avocado trees. Under a thin coat of leaves is a network of trunks and branches. They look solid, but essentially they are hollow. The leaves fight for sunlight. Some succeed for a while, but are edged out. Hedges exist layer after layer, though what we seem to see, or believe we see, is solidity. The leaves in this picture are busy outdoing the layer below them. The hedge looks fresh and green because what we see is the most recent layer.

Sometimes we can almost make out the pattern of the leaves. What is in fact controlled chaos, seems on the verge of order and careful design. Our eyes go from leaf to leaf, from one pattern to another, as we see what is almost but not quite there. I could spend the whole day looking at nothing but leaves.