My favorite time of year is here again – AUTUMN!

So once again you get my annual fall foliage portfolio.  And as always, it seems pretty logical the best way to begin our overview of the story behind fall’s phantasmagorical foliage fling is with … well, an overview of the vast verdant vegetation of the vales and vistas of Vermont.  (OK, OK – there probably are a few other states included – but that ruins my alliteration.)

So Just Try and Stop Me from Telling You Why Leaves Change Color

To understand why leaves change colors we need to realize that it’s part of a (hopefully) endless cycle.  Once a new leaf if fully formed, usually around June, the next thing a tree spends its energy on is setting the following year’s leaf buds.  The job of the leaves currently in place is to create and store food as carbohydrates/sugars necessary for that task.  And unlike us, trees are unique in that they’re able to manufacture their own food/energy, courtesy of photosynthesis.

Chlorophyll is the green pigmented chemical in leaves that uses the energy provided by the sun during the process of photosynthesis to convert water taken up by the roots and carbon dioxide taken from the air into sugars and starches – nutrients that the tree needs for growth – while giving off oxygen as a by-product.

But the chlorophyll that gives trees their green is not the only color pigment present in leaves all summer.  Working just as hard in the leaves are the carotenoids (carotene and xanthophyll).  These pigments are important in capturing light energy needed in the process of photosynthesis.  It’s just that the carotenoids are masked by the overpowering green of the chlorophyll during the summer months.

But with the coming of autumn, as daylight hours shorten and temperatures cool down, cells near the juncture of the leaf and its stem start to divide very rapidly.  This creates what is called an abscission layer.  This corky abscission layer of cells is the site where the leaf will eventually break from the tree and flutter to the ground.  That corky layer then serves to protect the branch through winter after the leaf leaves.

The rapid growth of that corky layer begins to physically block transport of nutrients needed by the leaf to manufacture the carbohydrates.  Consequently the photosynthesis that’s been creating chlorophyll (which is not a very stable chemical and has been rapidly broken down and replaced throughout the summer) ceases.

Once the chlorophyll is gone, the carotene and xanthophyll chemical pigments that have been present all summer long can now take center stage.

These carotenoids (carotene and xanthophyll) give their characteristic orange and yellow colors to not just leaves, but also to carrots, corn, canaries, and daffodils – as well as egg yolks, rutabagas, buttercups, and bananas.  And they account as the predominant color in about 15-30% of our tree species – typically the hardwood species of hickories, ash, maple, yellow poplar, aspen, birch, black cherry, sycamore, cottonwood, sassafras, and alder.

And the third class of color that trees have (the first two being chlorophyll and the carotenoids) are the reds and purples of anthocyanin.  But unlike the other two classes, anthocyanin has not been present in the leaves the whole summer.  The anthocyanins are created brand new –  just for autumn’s fall foliage!

Why the tree would expend its precious energy, when it’s shutting down for the winter, for the creation of a new product is not understood.  But we do know the brighter the sunlight during this period, the greater the production of anthocyanins – and the more brilliant the resulting reds and purples.  This pretty direct proportion of redness to sunlight exposure explains why the periphery of hardwood trees are bright red, while the foliage lower down and inside are the more typical oranges and yellows.

Anthocyanins also account for the coloring of cranberries, red apples, blueberries, cherries, strawberries, and plums.  They are present in only about 10% of hardwood species – mainly maples, sourwood, sweetgums, dogwoods, tupelos, cherry trees and persimmons.

But in a few lucky areas — most famously New England — up to 70% of tree species are the type that produce the anthocyanin pigment.  That high concentration of a single color (the reds of anthocyanin) accounts for the intense but relatively brief autumnal color display in New England.  Whereas in most other areas that have a higher mix of tree varieties the colors may not be as intense, but the season lasts longer.

You can see where your particularly area is peak-wise with this Interactive Peak Color Map.  Just slide the circle on the bar to the date you want.

Click Me for the Map

Time to enjoy some of my new favorite photos of the fantasia of fall …

Drone View of Fall Foliage in Quebec

A Tree Allée in Germany 

Bears Rocks in West Virginia 

Drone View of Farm Fields Cut Through a Forest in Keene, Ontario

Fall Foliage in the Fog

Drone View of Winding Road Through the Bogata Forest in Romania

Swans Enjoying the Autumnal Splendors

We’ll see you again next year!

ANOTHER VIEW ON GUN CONTROL

The Las Vegas shooting this week has given rise to many discussions on gun control (again), mainly on the left side of the field, while the right side either pushes for more guns for self-defense or maintains that it is too early to talk about it and without respect for those who were killed or wounded and their families and friends (again). This isn’t the first shooting that led me to write an ‘As Seen From Afar’ about gun control, and by now there’s little left to add. All arguments have been brought to the table and have been rehashed over and over, but nothing changes. Only the number of victims increases with each mayor shooting, something I personally think was the main motivation of Stephen Paddock: to go down in history as the man who single-handedly shot and killed or wounded the most people.

Having addressed the subject in at least two earlier articles, I thought it might be interesting to show how opinion in another country is increasingly influenced by recent American events and especially by its current politics. The following article is my translation of a column in my Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, by Frits Abrahams who writes a daily column about his observations in everyday Dutch life. Sometimes these columns are funny, now and again they are very serious, every now and then about politics, occasionally about sports, always with a keen eye for the human element and lately more often about America. Like many of us in The Netherlands, Frits can’t make heads or tails of America’s thing with guns:

Again the irony of it all. Three days before the slaughter in Las Vegas by a deranged shooter, our valued country singer Douwe Bob appeared in the peaceful ‘Ilse’s Veranda’, a  television program by Dutch country singer Ilse de Lange. Douwe [had made an item because] he was fond of outlaws and the weapons that went with it.

A resident of Nashville was heard to say that in cities of this size every week someone was shot and killed, and that he himself kept at least twenty weapons at home. Wasn’t it time to have a ban on that? ‘Not really,’ he smiled, ‘the weapon is not the perpetrator’.

After that Douwe visited Charlie Haffner, the owner of America’s oldest shooting range. Don’t you  want to shoot, Douwe? Yes, please! He shot at a shooting disc on which a bear was drawn. ‘Right between the eyes!‘ whooped Douwe. ‘Everyone can appreciate a good Winchester,’ Charlie said as if he was talking about an exquisite type of wine.

Douwe had to admit that ‘it’s also double, you know’. How? ‘I know what weapons do, Charlie is a fantastic guy, but on the other hand he’s a redneck, he just went crazy.’ Rednecks once were hardworking, rebellious white laborers in rural areas, but today they are mostly associated with macho behavior, racism and violence. Whether they all are going crazy, I do not know, but at the very least they love to show how tough they are. They are mostly men, as well as most of the mass shooters. They also love country music very much, just like me.

Stephen Paddock, the mass murderer in Las Vegas, does not have the background of an authentic redneck, as he apparently has become rich in real estate. But he loved weapons and country music; again it’s ironic: he was a country fan who killed other country fans. And Paddock, like Douwe Bob’s trigger-happy Charlie, must have gone crazy. A whole lot crazier even.

But the strangest form of irony to me is that America has become so scared of violence that it actually evokes this kind of violence. ‘This is the price we pay for freedom,’ said Billy O’Reilly, the ultra-right ex-anchorman of Fox News. ‘The Second Amendment clearly states that Americans have the right to protect themselves. Including crazy people.’

So to protect himself, O’Reilly hands out weapons to madmen, who can then shoot him out of their hotel room when he dances a little to Johnny Cash’s music. Now who has been going crazy here exactly?

I no longer can wrap my head around it and that’s why I understand the consternation of the comic US talk show hosts, who realized that they should suspend their irony for a while. ‘You want to be a change-oriented president and do everything different in Washington?’, Stephen Colbert called out to Trump. ‘Prove it! Do it! I mean it! You want to make America great again? Do what the last two presidents were unable to do. Come up with judicious weapons legislation, the vast majority of the American people want it too.

‘To do nothing is cowardice,’ said Colbert, ‘to do something requires courage.’ In fact, Colbert and his colleagues are asking for moral leadership here. If comics do that, there really has to be something going on.

This article was published in NRC Handelsblad on Wednesday, October 4, 2017, page 20

Cross-posted at C2NN here