I was four when I ate my first leaf. Beneath the sprawling avocado tree of my childhood backyard, I sat on an upturned bucket, making confetti from littered leaves. Upon finding a fresh green one, I paused my destruction and wadded it up until it became the size of a Lego brick. Each crease was a darker shade, emitting a faint salad-like aroma. Curiosity got the better of me, and I chewed.
I’ve eaten many (unconventional) leaves since then. My family emigrated from Hong Kong, where Sunday brunches at Dim Sum (Cantonese for “touching the heart”) is a family tradition. Lo mai gai is my favorite Dim Sum delicacy: sticky rice packaged in a lotus leaf, steamed to chewy perfection. It’s sweet-ish, sticky, savory, and loaded with pork, shrimp, and mushrooms. Hastily, I would unwrap the steaming bundles, ignoring the olive-green leaf fragments that remained glued to the rice. I used my bottom teeth to scrape the last remnants of rice from the husk, caring little for the pieces of leaf that entered my mouth. Once, I dared to lick the lotus leaf, nibbling at a corner that held precious grains of rice. The green parchment tasted like tea. Like home and love.
While hiking the sage-dotted chaparral mountains of Southern California, I searched the fleeting green fields for a distinctive yellow flower: black mustard. My friend and I gorged ourselves on these invasive weeds. They were perfumous and spicy like arugula. But we stomached the bitter, for each bite taken was a square foot of land reclaimed. Here in Connecticut, black mustard is less of a nuisance. Instead, the Northeasterners I’ve talked to call the Japanese knotweed an enemy. Unrelated to mustards, it’s a thicket-forming shrub that originated from the East Asian country, as its name suggests. However, no one I’ve spoken to thus far has dared take a bite out of their edible stems. Perhaps if they did, then they would appreciate leaves and their nourishment, too.
I spent my senior year of high school studying leaves and their morphology for Science Olympiad. In hopes of a deeper connection with nature—and a state medal—I attempted to master the subject, obsessing over their variety and medicinal properties. Alongside my notebooks and pens, I carried Audubon’s Field Guide to North American Trees.
When I arrived at Yale, I began cataloging every New England tree I could find. My field guide has since become a herbarium, a dried and pressed collection of plant paraphernalia. I transformed pages of the Yale Daily News into drying sheets for my serendipitous findings. On grey afternoons, when I miss the texture of my carpet or the smell of mom’s stir-fried bok choy, I find myself sitting beneath the Timothy Dwight ginkgo tree, watching the honey-toned flashes swirling by.
I now have this little habit of folding ginkgo leaves. Take two leaves, one larger and one smaller. Overlay them with the smaller one on top. Fold them into bilateral symmetry and tie a simple knot with the two stems. Voila. You’ve just made a butterfly. It can’t fly, but it transports me all the way home. Ask anyone on my high school science team: ginkgos have always been my favorite. How funny it is that leaves should spell seasons. They grow with the spring sun, die elegantly with the autumn wind. Withered and curled in the winter, they feed the growth of the year anew.
