Bright splashes on some of our trees tell us it’s underway: The Annual Change of Colors. From late September through October, many deciduous green trees and shrubs in our temperate zone become flame-colored, glowing in bright yellows, oranges, reds, and burgundies. Although it may appear so, the green color in the leaves does not transform to yellow or red. Plant leaves are green in spring and summer because of chlorophyll, the green chemical that plants produce to make food from raw materials and sunlight. Chlorophyll breaks down quickly in sunlight and the plant has to continually replenish it. But green leaves usually also have other colored chemicals, including carotenoids (yellow and orange) and anthocyanins (red). And burgundy? Anthocyanin in acidic leaf sap turns red; anthocyanin in alkaline leaf sap turns bluish or purple. Different species of color-changing trees — and trees in different environments — have different proportions of some or all of these bright chemicals. These other leaf chemicals<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bright splashes on some of our trees tell us it’s underway: The Annual Change of Colors. From late September through October, many deciduous green trees and shrubs in our temperate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,348],"tags":[461,317,6,185],"class_list":["post-146864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-science","tag-gardening","tag-home-garden","tag-lifestyle","tag-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}