If you look at a tree long enough, you eventually begin to notice the spacing between the leaves. That space is intentional. Anyone who has spent time on the internet has probably seen those photographs of neighbouring branches carefully avoiding one another, as if all the articulation and elasticity in the natural world had quietly agreed on one goal: keeping the trees from touching each other.

That intended space also falls to the ground with the leaves every autumn. It has a very precise, though largely uncelebrated, function: the nourishment and genesis of springles.

In recent years, the rather foolish practice of gathering and burning leaves has been discouraged across much of Eastern Europe. In the UK — birthplace of the meticulously trimmed — gardeners have, since Victorian times, been content to let the leafy carpet decompose over winter. My neighbours, however, remain committed to a more antiquated aesthetic. Each autumn, they carefully collect and compress the fallen poplar leaves into plastic bags, a gesture that seems to flatter their sense of order in a building otherwise at an advanced

stage of decline.

For reasons unclear, in 2019 this ritual was abandoned. The leaves were left to rot through the winter and into the following season, which allowed me to make this short recording on a warm, starling-filled night in spring.

The metadata is precise: Wednesday, 1 April 2020, 00:32.

It remains one of my dearest recordings because, if you are patient enough — beyond the passing traffic, the distant dogs, the earthworms, and what may or may not be a power plant — you can clearly hear the springles.

“Pui de pămînt,” as we call them in Romanian.

Soil babies.