Leaflessness

Trees, which in the south stand bare during the winter months, have here but a short period of leaflessness. ❋ Unknown (2004)

He had planted slim switches of one kind after another and the wind had blown each to leaflessness, until now there stood a slim row of cottonwoods that he had tried as a last resort, but the same thing would happen to them, perhaps. ❋ Zoe Anderson Norris (N/A)

The small trees that grew about it shivered in their leaflessness; the rank grass was wan under the failing day; most of the stones leaned this way or that, emblems of neglect (they were very white at the top, and darkened downwards till the damp soil made them black), and certain cats and dogs were prowling or sporting among the graves. ❋ George Gissing (1880)

Look at the anatomy of any tree, as it is disclosed to us in its wintry leaflessness, a beautiful composition of line rather than of form (see illustration, p. 143 [f081b]). ❋ Walter Crane (1880)

There was everything to repel -- the cold, the frost, the hardness, the snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. ❋ Richard Jefferies (1867)

After the silence and the leaflessness, to have the birds back once more and to feel them busy at the nest-building; how glad to give them the moss and fibres and the crutch of the boughs to build in! ❋ Richard Jefferies (1867)

He took up his abode in his royal apartments in the Castle; and the next day, as he paused in his Sunday walk round the exterior, he looked with no especial anxiety Londonwards, but rejoiced once more in the view of the Thames flowing by Eton, and the far expanse of lull and valley, villages and fair houses, noble even in its wintry leaflessness and the dull gloom of the December air. ❋ David Masson (1864)

Alas! poor covert now in their naked leaflessness for the stricken deer! ❋ John Wilson (1819)

a harvest of new plants in the garden; for the rose-trees, emaciated with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on the earth like ground-ivy or climbed the wall like a creeper. ❋ Rebecca West (1937)