The name came from a boundary. David Reeve and Luciane Pisani used to live opposite one of London's ancient woodlands, and every autumn they watched the leaves fall in two directions: into the wood, where they mulched back into soil, and onto the pavement outside the perimeter fence, where pedestrians slipped on them in the rain. That image — nature's rhythms meeting the hard edges of the city, one system feeding life and the other causing small injuries — became the founding metaphor for Where the Leaves Fall, a quarterly magazine exploring humankind's connection with nature through the intersection of social justice, science, art, philosophy, and food.
Reeve, a British filmmaker, and Pisani, a Brazilian art director, co-founded the magazine with Karen Leason, director of OmVed Gardens — a creative space in Highgate, north London, undergoing ecological restoration since 2017. The first issue appeared in 2019, and the editorial model was deliberate: two editors from the global north and south, working together to understand the historical power imbalances between those regions and how to heal them. Each issue was built around three themes, developed in conversation with the OmVed team, then expanded through open calls and commissions to writers, artists, photographers, and Indigenous communities worldwide. The magazine paid contributors, printed on environmentally responsible stock, and invited guest editors — including Brazilian Indigenous activist Txai Suruí, who edited an entire issue centred on the cosmology and resistance of Indigenous peoples.
Where the Leaves Fall ran for sixteen issues between 2019 and 2024, each one a 140-page, 170 × 240 mm journal that read more like a beautifully designed anthology than a conventional magazine. Sub-editor Patrick Steel shaped the first ten issues; deputy editor Niellah Arboine joined from issue eleven. The publication presented voices that mainstream media routinely marginalises — Indigenous leaders, environmental scientists, grassroots activists — and treated them not as curiosities but as the most important thinkers of the climate era. It was, in the end, exactly what its founders intended: a seed packet, with each feature carrying the potential to sow some change in a reader's mind.
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