More Than Just Colors

Even as we sadly say goodbye to another autumn season, I do not cease to marvel at nature’s intelligence.  Nowhere is this intelligence more readily evident than in the annual transformation of the color of deciduous tree leaves.  The leaves appear at first in spring, then turn shades of vivid green through summer, and go on to sport the vibrant autumnal hues from yellow to orange to red, we call fall colors.  Eventually, as nights grow longer and days grow shorter, the wind and the rain do their part to take down the leaves and have them cover and protect the earth from impending frost.  This cycle starts all over again after winter is through and spring recurs. 

As if the esthetics of leaf color transformation is not already a grand spectacle, the underlying science is even more prodigious.  The timing of the appearance of greens of the chlorophyll, the yellows of the flavonoid, the oranges of the carotenoid and ultimately the reds of the anthocyanin is choreographed intricately by the changing duration of daily sunlight and numerous other influencers.  And, to think that this is just an annual parade of colors would be profoundly discounting the deliberate process of co-evolution of deciduous leaves and many other dependent species, insects in particular, over millions of years.  All this, can you believe, to survive the onslaught of time and fit in better?!

John Keats expressed this confluence of what we see and what we must comprehend in the last two lines of his famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”  It reads thus: 

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.