Just clear of the maple's canopy, in the flowerbed beyond my study window, a few plants are still taking strength from the waning sunlight to produce an echo of last spring's bloom.

A tall bearded iris has thrown up a stem carrying three virginal white blossoms. The cultivar is called 'Immortality' and every time I see its unblemished petals, I get a niggling urge to breed a shrieking scarlet version and register it as 'Immorality'. Close to the iris, one of the Explorer Series roses, 'Henry Kelsey', scrambles untidily up a tall tree stump and, on the ends of long wispy canes, it is dangling flowers that bounce around in the breeze like livid red yoyos.

Despite the relative dearth of anything to pick up, a leaf vacuuming crew from the city has already been down the street once, so the annual race to benefit from the year's last harvest is now on.

Nature does not make waste; nature creates resources. The fall bounty of foliage and miscellaneous herbaceous leftovers are the basis of the next year's rebirth, so home gardeners who have access to fallen leaves should consider themselves blessed. What kind of gardener would pass up the opportunity to get free fertilizer, free soil conditioner and free mulch?

It used to be the common wisdom that if fallen leaves were left on a lawn, then the grass would suffocate and die. I suppose that if the leaves are from a catalpa tree and are the size of dinner plates, or if drifts of leaves a couple of feet thick are allowed to lie all winter, then the grass might suffer. But that is just mismanagement; it has nothing to do with conserving and maximizing nature's beneficence.

The keys to efficiently dealing with leaves are to not wait for them all to fall and become wet and unmanageable, and to not move them about or pick them up.

As dry leaves are mostly air surrounded by thin cell walls, it takes relatively little energy to shatter them into flakes and dust. Just running a mower over leaves will reduce their volume dramatically and most of the finer bits will drop between the blades of grass as an overwinter protection and as a deterrent to spring-germinating annual weeds.

Setting the mower to its highest level and shredding a little and often is an effective strategy, especially if the mower is of the mulching sort with no exit chute. If the mower has a side discharge then it can be used to get some cover on adjacent flowerbeds.

Start in the middle of the lawn and work outwards blowing the larger debris towards the peripheral beds. If there are island beds, just arrange the traveling patterns to evenly distribute the wealth.

The paradox of leaf collection is that it takes far less time, money, and energy - both physical and petro-chemical - to deal with fallen leaves in situ than it does to rake them to the road for municipal disposal.

In situ, the lawn mower is probably long paid for, it is used all the growing season, and it likely takes no more than a few minutes and less than a cup of fuel to do a quick run over the lawn. Raking leaves from the back of the lot to the curb by itself can take hours and that is only the beginning.

Consider the cost and fuel consumption of the special-purpose vacuum machines, the purpose-built containers, the truck and driver, and the walking crew of three or four, just to get the leaves off the street.

Now drive the truck to a transfer station, unload, reload into tractor trailers, and drive out of town to a composting facility. After several weeks of processing, pack the resulting residue into heavy, single-use, plastic bags and ship it back to Brampton for sale to the very people who threw the leaves away in the first place.