A Norway maple leaf, suffering from tar spot, on the parched grass of one hot August. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

I was visiting a friend at an apartment complex this week when two women walked out the door. As I went in, I heard one of them — startled by the layer of dry leaves on the lawn — say to her companion:

“It’s fall already?”

She noticed an unsettling — but not unusual — trend throughout the parks and back yards of Syracuse, as we move toward “State Fair Time” and late summer.

The crumpled, brittle leaves of Norway maples fall in little waves, whenever a hot breeze blows. The splotchy leaves float in pools and turn to dust beneath lawn mowers. Neighbors more accustomed to chatting over the fence about daylilies or other blossoms in their gardens find themselves puzzling over this grim layer of zombie leaves across the yard.

Syracuse city arborist Steve Harris has certainly taken notice. The cold, wet grind of last spring has resulted in what he describes as occasional patches of a cosmetic fungal disease particularly common to many Norway maples. The culprit is known as tar spot, which he said creates round, ash-colored spots on the leaves.

While it’s certainly not good for a tree, Harris said Norway maples will typically recover from that disease. Still, he said it’s wise to rake up the leaves and twigs as they fall this summer and get them away from underneath the tree, so spores don’t rise up in the spring and start the process again.

The impact of tar spot is noticeable in many neighborhoods. Yet Harris and Don Leopold, a distinguished teaching professor and tree expert from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, said this year’s trouble is nowhere close to as bad as a wave of fungal infections a few years ago that completely defoliated thousands of Norway maples in Syracuse.

The way a lot of August yards are looking, in Syracuse. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

“It’s worse this year than last year, but half of what it was then,” said Harris, recalling a season when the Norways were hit by both tar spot and anthracnose, another cosmetic fungus that visibly affects tree leaves.

Leopold said the situation isn’t helped by the intense heat and “bone dry” conditions of recent weeks, which creates even more strain for the urban forest. But he described Norway maples as a tough and hardy tree, and he doubts this year’s struggle will result in any lasting widespread damage.

Indeed, Harris said we can’t even count on one secondary benefit you’d assume would come with an early leaf fall: Norway maples are often stubborn about giving up their leaves in October, sometimes holding out so deep into November that it takes the first heavy snowfall to bring down those leaves.

Norway maple leaves with ‘tar spot’ float in an above-ground pool. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

This kind of summertime “fungal fall,” you might think, would at least mean that we’ll deal with the bulk of those fallen leaves, early in the season — and thus have fewer fallen leaves and less work to do in late October and November.

Don’t count on it, Harris said. He said the Norways will often “leaf out again” later in the season if they experience leaf loss, even though it isn’t particularly good for the tree — because it demands expending energy best saved for winter.

In other words, for many of us with Norways in our yards in Syracuse, the two women I overheard the other day were right: Thanks to tar spot, we are seeing an early fall, weeks before the neighborhood kids head to school — though there’s also a good chance we’ll still be raking leaves from those same trees when the kids are ready for some time off at Thanksgiving.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...