These brightly coloured leaves have fallen from mangrove trees growing on the edge of the sandy beach at Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia. The trees shed their leaves steadily throughout the year and sometimes the leathery leaves are trapped for a while on the beach – amongst the tangled above-ground root systems, or snagged by algae-covered emergent aerial roots, and clumped behind boulders. Leaves that are washed into the sea can accumulate in large numbers and return with subsequent tides, forming heaps along the strand-line. I loved the contrasting colours of the fallen mangrove leaves on the sand; and the way that they made a thick bright soup in the sea that rhymically moved with the waves (as in the video clip shown below).
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Jessica's Nature Blog 
One could become self-sufficient in leaf compost!
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You could but it wouldn’t do any good to the garden – too much salt sucked up by the mangroves – and think of the difficulty of explaining to Customs and Excise what you were doing with a hundred weight of dried leaves in your suitcase on the return from your holiday.
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