''Even the leaves of the wintered-through oaks''

Fresh and freshness have three main meanings : newly produced (and so not yet faded, rotten or damaged) ; bright, healthy and full of energy ; and pure. Newness, brightness and purity : these three qualities (or two, or one) are ascribed to certain things, -and not to others : old stumps, dead leaves, faded flowers, apples with soft brown spots, -and other things decayed and useless. Useless ? Not for compost, which becomes more fertile : there is no matter without energy. Organic matter (and inorganic as well : particles in atoms are not fixed and inert) is not static, it changes at every moment, from the seed to the compost, it is new at every moment, and so it is fresh at every moment -even the leaves of the wintered-through oaks :

Already (listen!) you can hear the first

rakes ; once more the rhythm of men

through the held-back silence of the resolute earth

in early spring. What has so often

come to you is coming once more,

vivid as if for the first time. Now,

slowly, you await what you always hoped for

but never took. It always took you.

                                                                                                                                                                                      wikimediaImages

Even the leaves of the wintered-through oaks
seem in the twilight a future brown.
Breezes signal, then signal back. 

Black are the bushes. Yet heaps of dung 
lie more intensely black on the ground. 
Every hour that goes by grows younger.

(Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 25, tr. Stephen Mitchell, 2009)