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I once found myself in New England during the so-called Fall Foliage season, normally occurring between mid-September and mid-October. On a bus from Boston airport to Concord, New Hampshire, I was glued to the window. Mouth agape, I was trying to absorb the wild riot of colour displayed by the trees lining the highway. It was simply beyond description: I never knew so many shades of purple, red and brown existed in nature. I felt myself dissolved and drowning in this incredible natural palette.

The moment I arrived in Concord, however, I was doused with cold water. “You have come too late,” a young woman from the local Chamber of Commerce who met me at the bus station commented. “The leaves are just behind peak. Not half as good as ten days ago.” I tried to object meekly that they were still good enough for me, but she didn’t listen. “Leaf-peeping is a big business here,” she said while driving me to my hotel and explained that the season is “officially” (sic) divided into four “official” (sic again!) stages: 1. Just beginning; 2.Well-established; 3. Peak; and 4. Just behind peak. With my Jewish luck, I obviously hit the last – and the least interesting ('officially', no doubt) stage.

The Notting Hill Carnival of maples, aspens and birches was whooshing past the windows of our car. Having suppressed a sudden yawn, I had the impression that the screaming brightness of their leaves had indeed faded in the past several minutes.

In his United States, 1893 guide-book, Karl Baedeker remarked that “the colour of autumn leaves is an additional attraction” of New England. A century later, it has become the main attraction and a big business indeed. True, one can still admire autumn leaves for free, but, as I was told in Vermont (after they dutifully assured me that my arrival was “belated”: what I saw was not the “real fall” and the leaves were not as good as the week before), the visiting leaf-peepers add over a billion dollars to the state coffers each autumn. No wonder leaf-peeping is often referred to as “a cornerstone of New England tourist industry”.

Like every big (and small) business, New England autumn has to be properly managed. In New Hampshire, they designate twenty ‘official leaf-peepers’ whose ‘official’ duties include observing the leaves, compiling twice-weekly reports and suggesting the best ‘leaf-peeping routes’. There were not many of those on offer by the time I arrived in Connecticut, where I was immediately informed that “the oaks had turned” - meaning became brown and no longer gold - and the prime fall-foliage was over. They nevertheless kindly offered to take me to a ‘primary foliage viewing area’, where, allegedly, I could still catch some last ‘truly golden’ leaves, but I refused.

I couldn’t, however, refuse a copy of ‘Leaf-Peeper’s Guide’ which I studied in the quiet of my hotel room. I had read somewhere that the exact mechanism of the spectacular displays of autumn leaves’ colours was a mystery to scientists. Whether it was true or not, I preferred it to remain a fairy tale - like that of Santa Claus. But a big business, such as the New England autumn has become in America, has no place for fairy tales.

My brand-new “Leaf-Peeper’s Guide” left no stone (or leaf) unturned to shatter the mystery to smithereens: “In fall, partly because of shorter periods of daylight and the cooler temperatures, the leaves stop making food. The chlorophyll breaks down and the green colour disappears. Yellow and orange, previously masked by the green, appear. The vibrant reds, purples and bronzes come from other chemical processes…" Nice and clear.

A brilliant book "Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America" by Stephen M. Fjellman, a leading American anthropologist, starts with the following description: "There is a tree in Central Florida. It is maybe 90 feet high and huge around the base and has a crown that stretches across almost as many yards as the tree is tall. From the top of this tree, when the wind is still, you can see almost to the Caribbean. The trunk looks about as much like that of a live oak as one might wish. The bark is deeply grained and covered with that pea-soup green-coloured stuff you see on the trees in hot, wet places. It's a big nice tree, a good place for the treehouse that adorns it. But it's not made of wood. The trunk and the branches are formed out of pressed concrete wrapped around a steel-mesh frame. The bark and green stuff that cover much of it are painted on. The leaves, all 800,000 of them are made of vinyl (italics are mine)."

Stephen Fjellmam proceeds to explain that the tree, Disneyodendron eximus ('out-of-ordinary Disney tree'), is in the Adventureland part of Walt Disney's World Magic Kingdom. For him, it became a symbol of ‘commodification’ (just another word for ‘plasticizing’, I presume) of modern American culture.

The widow of my hotel room in Concord, NH, overlooked a vast courtyard of a Victorian lunatic asylum, now - a ‘psychiatric hospital’. In the treacherous semi-light of the early dusk, the ‘past-peak’ autumn leaves in it were aglow and blending with the headlights of the cars behind the hospital fence. What ‘chemical processes’ had made them look so desperately gorgeous? Or was it because they preferred burning alive to being plasticized?

The trees were offering no answers.

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