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Seal of the Maple Hollow Department of Leaf Reattachment
Maple Hollow Department of Leaf Reattachment
COLLECTION SEASON OPENS OCTOBER 5. Zone 1 bags go to the curb the morning of Monday, October 5. Tags are in the mail. Bags without a parcel tag are treated as donations to the surplus bay. Check your zone.

Every leaf back on its tree

The Department of Leaf Reattachment collects Maple Hollow's fallen leaves each autumn, stores them over winter at the Municipal Sorting Facility, and reattaches every leaf to its tree of origin each spring. The Department serves all 2,300 registered trees in the six collection zones. Rake to the curb in October. The canopy comes back in April. That is the whole arrangement, and it has held since 1971.

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4.1MLeaves reunited last cycle
2,300Registered trees served
61%Species accuracy, FY 2025-26
14 moCurrent oak backlog

How the two-season cycle works

Autumn: collection

Rake your leaves to the curb during your zone's collection week, in approved paper bags, each bag labeled with your tree's parcel number. Crews truck the bags to the Municipal Sorting Facility, where staff sort every leaf by species, size, and sun exposure and file it in a climate-controlled bay for the winter.

Spring: reattachment

Beginning in April, bucket truck crews work zone by zone, reattaching each leaf to its tree of origin with adhesive meeting Town Specification TA-6. Standard practice is trunk-outward. Crews do not take requests from the ground, and they can hear you.

A Department bucket truck crew reattaching leaves to a maple in spring
A Zone 2 crew at work on Sugarhouse Road, May 2026. Photo: Department Field Operations.

About the Department

The Department operates the Municipal Sorting Facility on Compost Court, eleven climate-controlled storage bays, a fleet of four bucket trucks, and one leaf vacuum that is older than most of the staff. Sorting runs around the clock from mid-October to Thanksgiving. Reattachment runs April through early July, weather permitting, which it frequently does not.

Labeled paper leaf bags at the curb on a Maple Hollow street in autumn
Correctly tagged bags on Russet Lane, October 2025.
Staff sorting leaves by species at the Municipal Sorting Facility
The sorting line at the Municipal Sorting Facility.

The Department is governed by the five-member Leaf Board, which meets the first Thursday of each month at 6:30 PM in the Sorting Facility break room. Agendas, minutes, and the annual report are posted here. Residents with concerns about a specific leaf should bring the leaf.

A short history

The original reattachment crew with wooden ladders, 1971
The original reattachment crew, spring 1972.

The Department was established by town meeting vote in 1971, following the Bare Spring of 1970, when the town green failed to leaf out and tourism receipts fell 60 percent. The first crews worked from wooden ladders with brush-applied paste and reattached 11,000 leaves their first season, most of them to the correct trees. Bucket trucks arrived in 1979, species sorting in 1986, and parcel-level tracking in 2004. The Department has completed 55 consecutive cycles and does not discuss the spring of 2024 in Zone 3 beyond what is published in Notice 24-07.