If you are like most people, you love to see the changing colors of the Fall leaves when summer shifts into the fall season.
You may have been awed by the beauty of leaves in the fall, yet did you ask yourself the cause of the multicolored leaves? What in Nature triggers the multiple colors of leaves we see during the fall season?
The purpose leaves provide in regards to the life of a tree provides insights about color variations among leaves. Leaves produce food for the tree.
In brief, here’s how it works.
How leaves work
- Carbon dioxide from the air
- Photosynthesis
- Water from roots
Roots provide leaves with the water required for life.
Trees also take carbon dioxide gas from the air. It‘s a common argument that an excellent way to combat global warming is to plant additional trees that will remove harmful carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Sunlight is the catalyst that employs water from a tree‘s root system to change carbon dioxide into oxygen and glucose. A byproduct of this process is that, to the joy of man, oxygen is produced! The tree uses the glucose as its food. The name of this amazing process that provides life for both the human and plant worlds is photosynthesis. The green color so obvious in most leaves at early stages of development is the result of chlorophyll, an important chemical to photosynthesis.
It‘s a mystery how the message is shared, but trees somehow know, or at lease sense, when winter is approaching. At this point in time, trees begin exhibiting consistent signs that they are aware of the season and the changes they must make. Without abundant natural light, photosynthesis cannot occur throughout the winter.
There also may be less water available due to freezing and/or less precipitation. Suddenly, the trees lose the ability to produce food. Tree survival is not challenged, however, because of how much food the tree stored over the spring and summer.
When trees stop making food, they no longer have a need for green chlorophyll. It disappears from the leaves. The removal of chlorophyll from leaves parallels the loss of green coloring. Although leaves with chlorophyll might be green, that doesn‘t mean that‘s necessarily their natural color! Lacking the green in chlorophyll, leaves resort to the original colors they‘ve always had. Once that is removed, you are left with the Fall leaves real color!
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