I DON’T know about you, but I’m not a fan of leaf blowers. They’re noisy and, it seems to me, don’t achieve that much.

I suspect some gardeners love them since wandering around the garden moving a few leaves back and forth could be seen as a better alternative than the hard work involved in digging a flower bed over.

Despite my disdain for the leaf blowers, I don’t doubt leaves can be a challenge in the fall season, as our USA cousins accurately call it.

A typical tree has up to 200,000 leaves and a big mature tree might exceed 500,000.

More distressingly, that might add up to over half a tonne of leaves, which will soon to plummeting onto my driveway and will require shifting. The additional trouble with sycamores, the main tree in our garden, is that the leaves are so big.

So, I need to be positive and consider the benefits of such leaves. They are nature’s fertiliser. After they fall, microbe activity, or fungi, begins the breakdown of the leaves, aided by bigger insects.

They produce leaf mould which is a great soil supplement and can be used as a mulch. When ready, it’s dry, crumbly and airy – lovely stuff.

Of course, there are issues, as it’s calculated half a million tonnes of leaves – an estimated 500 billion leaves – fall on the railway lines.

This leads to the dreaded “leaves on the line” delays to services as the mushed leaves impact train performance around the country through the changing seasons.

In response, a range of sophisticated machinery has been utilised to try to solve the problem.

And there’s a cost, in terms of delays and rail disruption – of £350-million per year. So, it’s not cheap for what we think is a few leaves.