Stephen McGinty: In the garden something's stirring…

EVERYONE has agreed that we have enjoyed an autumn of great beauty. On almost every tree-lined street there have been displays of copper-tinged, yellow-flecked loveliness, and yet all I could think was: 'we'll pay for this' - and now I am.

• 'The Devil's instrument': the noisy but effective leaf-blower has caused many a neighbour to fall out Picture: PA

The seasons have rotated round and what was a blessing in autumn has become winter's curse. I speak, of course, of leaves.

The green, sinewy, slender slates that cloak the trees which surround my house are, to my great annoyance, committing suicide. With no regard to my schedule or aptitude for physical labour, they are straining to separate themselves from twig and branch so as to hurtle down on to my driveway, gutters and grass garden. I'm sure each one's last thought was contented delight at the inconvenience their disposal will cause.

Leaves, I have decided after years of enforced interaction, are inherently selfish.

Sure, when alive they provide an attractive screen through which the sunlight will play, and the sound on a windy day can be almost symphonic. But is that enough to balance out the weekly chore to which we are all expected to dedicate ourselves for the next month or so?

The problem, I believe, is exacerbated by timing. If our leaves, like lemmings, decided on one particular day simultaneously to end it all, then imagine the convenience. We may well awake to a thick snowdrift, a brown-crinkled carpet composed of nature's little hand-prints, and this would require steady hours of labour to shift, but once they were all bagged, or blown, or heaped, then ceremonially torched, that would be it. Life would go on, we could settle down to staring out at our tree's bony twigs and ponder the arrival of spring.

But, no - that would be too easy. Instead, they drag out their demise and so extend our torture. Once one phalanx has fallen, been cleared up, another battalion is right behind. Leaves!

Then there is the question of how exactly to get rid of them? Do you use a leaf-blower, in which case you find yourself chasing a recalcitrant spinning funnel of leaves, like a neighbour's errant dog, out the front gate where they will instantly become the council's concern? Or do you use a leaf-sucker, which gobbles them up into a massive bag, which quickly strains the shoulder and requires emptying every 15 minutes? Personally, I'm a black bag kind of guy.

Armed with a trusty plastic rake, I attempt to marshal them into little piles dotted around the garden, then cram them into their communal body bag and leave them for the binmen to take them off in their smelly funeral hearse. I set myself a target of five bags per weekend. The secondary problem is my terminal procrastination. There is no job so important that it cannot be tackled a week on Tuesday, and so, on clement days when the leaves are brittle and dry, I will instantly decide that today is not the day, but tomorrow, when thunderstorms have reduced them to a sodden pulp as they have done this week and the task becomes akin to stirring porridge, will, however, be just right.

There is also the question of leaf etiquette. While you and your leaf-blower may wish to make an early start on a Saturday morning, your exertions and the whining chatter of your electric companion may not be so welcome to your resting neighbours. Remember, not only are your actions liable to wake them from slumber, but they will also ignite the nagging guilt that they, too, should be up and setting about them. The leaves, of course, not their neighbours.

In America, however, the image of neighbour setting about neighbour is a distinct possibility, so fractious has the debate over the leaf-blower now become - or as protesters in Orinda, California, refer to it "the Devil's instrument". Further down the coast in Los Angeles, where the council considered a ban, Julie Newmar, who played Catwoman in the TV series, described this throbbing engine of industry as "a three-foot extension of a gardener's masculinity". Yet for every person who views the device as a foul noise pollutant, there is another staunch defender of the right to blow away leaves. For them, the only way they will give up their leafblowers is if they are prised from their cold dead hands. (Or as one writer pointed out last week, their Hispanic gardeners' cold, dead hands.) In fact, it took a week-long hunger strike by ten Hispanic gardeners outside Los Angeles City Hall to, well, ban the ban. The California Senate ordered a study into the dangers of leaf-blowers. The 68-page report concluded that what was required was … further study.

The argument critics make is that leaf-blowers may make the same level of sound as a lawnmower, but while the lawnmower's sound is constant, the leafblower's pitch oscilates constantly, meaning it rarely descends into background noise. As one manufacturer admitted: "it can be as difficult to ignore as a crying baby."

In Orinda, protesters go out on patrol with a decibel meter and laser range-finder, so they can pinpoint errant blowers at a distance of one thousand feet.

So who do we have to thank for these contraption? The Japanese, who generously bestowed upon us the Sony Walkman, video camera and, well, Godzilla, originally developed it the 1960s as a tool for dispersing pesticides on to fruit trees. When the chemical canister was removed, they discovered that you had the perfect device for chasing leaves around the garden.

But don't we lose something of the stillness and serenity of garden toil by use of these devices? Protesters cite Leo Marx, the cultural critic who coined the term "the machine in the garden" to describe those engines of progress, such as the steamboat that crushed Huck Finn's raft, which challenge the gentler way of life. And are they really that much speedier? Well, a study by the Los Angeles department of water and power found that a grandmother armed with rake and broom took just 20 per cent longer to clear up a test plot.

Personally, I'm sticking with the rake. In fact, I had planned to have this column illustrated with myself posing with the rake in a recreation of the famous "American Gothic" painting of the pitch-forked farmer. Then, I snapped the rake while trying to drag out a bundle of sodden leaves the size and weight of a stunned calf.

Yet it's the inevitability of the struggle I find dispiriting. Last year I was still raking out bundles I'd missed in April, while any hope of ignoring them in the false belief that, like problems, they will just blow away is similarly doomed to failure as you find yourself wading through mulch in March.

Still, it is comforting to know that anyone with a garden is in this together. Misery, as they say, loves company.