The History of Leaves as Told by a Squirrel

A long time ago, before pug dogs and Siamese cats, before the domestication of humans by cows and geese, I mean, a really, really long time ago, just after the Earth shook under the pounding crash of dinosaur feet, the leaves of the trees were not symmetrical. You might say that is hard to believe, but then I can just show you some mouse-hole geometry and let’s see if you understand that.

No, it’s true. Leaves had no reason to look the same on both sides. Leaves just grew to wherever the sunlight was. That is, in fact, the purpose of a leaf: to soak in the sunlight. Why would a leaf minimize its soaking potential in the slightest? What could possibly be the evolutionary advantage of a star-shaped leaf? A squiggly leaf with so much empty space that just has to, just has to be the same on both sides?

Explain it to me.

But you cannot. Because you are not a squirrel. I presume.

But I am. I will explain it to you.

Well, as I have mentioned, in the beginning, all the leaves just grew to whatever shape they wanted. There were leaves of every imaginable silhouette. It would have been inconceivable at that time to imagine leaves as being symmetrical. It would be a bit like imagining now that all rocks were cubes. Imagine that. There would be outrage. Petitions would be drafted. Protests would be organized. Governments would probably fall. People would laud the beauty of asymmetrical stone. They would say but what about our beautiful mountains! Our stunning cliffs! You get the idea.

So what changed?

Well, we did.

That’s right. We may look cute. We might be patronizingly commended on our nut-hoarding. It’s nice to see us scampering and nibbling away, isn’t it?

But we have you exactly where we want you. Well, to be more precise, we have leaves exactly where we want them. Ha, ha. You see, us squirrels are extremely, unbelievably OCD. For those of you unfamiliar with OCD, it is a condition wherein one is obsessively compelled to symmetry. Everything has to be in order. Everything has to be exactly how it should be.

There is no more OCD animal than the squirrel. Think about it. What’s with the nut hoarding? We aren’t the only animal to hibernate over winter. Lots of other animals do it. But you don’t see bears stock-piling honey. You don’t see badgers wheeling about carts full of apples with the intention of secreting them away in some underground larder. No, we freely admit it: the squirrel is unique. Uniquely OCD that is.

So you can imagine our consternation when, popping freshly onto the evolutionary scene with an insatiable lust for nuts, we found that our desired food lay nestled in amongst the haphazard foliage of the spontaneous leaves. It was a nightmare. The first squirrels used to take a deep breath, close their eyes and dash blindly along the branches just hoping they could knock off a nut. Many squirrels ran directly off the branches and fell to the forest floor, (incidentally, this did give rise to the evolution of the flying squirrel).

It was not a good time for us squirrels. Something had to be done.

As with most great innovations, it all started with one pioneer. A squirrel by the name of Gluck, having to himself a great and bountiful walnut tree, began one day to nibble at some of the outermost leaves on the tree. In an hour or two, he had worked his way halfway down the branch, having taken careful bites out of the sides of every leaf on his way. Soon, he had created a tunnel of roughly symmetrical leaves which led him from where he had jumped onto the tree to the sweet nuts at the end of the branch.

Gluck didn’t stop there. The next day he was at it again, nibbling along another branch. In a month, he had completed the tree. He sat back and admired his craftsmanship. It was a sight to behold. In absolute ecstasy, he ran up and down the branches and trunk, somersaulted from precarious twigs, and flung himself with total disregard through leaf after symmetrical leaf.

Word soon got around. Squirrels from all reaches of the forest came to praise Gluck’s wonderful tree. This was all in an age before patents and copyright, so it wasn’t long before squirrels began to imitate Gluck’s achievement. All through the forest, the air sang loudly with the cacophony of nibbling squirrels. In a season, these squirrels had remodeled an entire forest to suit their demand for uniformity.

And the surprising thing was, although we just take it for granted nowadays, that many squirrels discovered their own style. Some were rather traditional, and went for simple oval-shaped leaves, (we love ovals, maybe because nuts are oval), but some went extremely creative, as can be seen with the leaf of the Swiss cheese plant, or the horse chestnut. Some squirrels were even almost poetic, as exemplified in the irony of the oak leaf, which is symmetrical but harkens back to the olden days of leaf chaos that came before.

But what happened the following year, I hear you ask. What happened when the leaves came back again all non-symmetrical in spring? Well, that’s the difference between you humans and us squirrels. You would have given up. You would have gone all depressed and maybe jacked the whole thing in. Because the leaves did come back non-symmetrical. But we were undaunted. We had seen a world of arboreal equivalence and had experienced its delights. We did it all over again. And again. And again. We did it for so long, in fact, that the trees adapted to the new regime. Evolution took over, and the trees began to produce symmetrical leaves all on their own.

Today, nobody passes a single mention of the fact that leaves are symmetrical. No one wonders that leaves are all symmetrical and yet so varied. You humans never ask why. And you watch happy, prancing squirrels as we merrily bounce along from branch to branch, tree to tree, without the faintest idea that it is all because we just can’t stand it when things are not the same on both sides.