Fort Meadow Reservoir.
I think of each new season as an evolution, not a change in style.
-Manolo Blahnik-
The rail trail is a bit chilly today. It’s after 3 PM and still the temperature is only around 50℉. The sky is clear and there’s a 12 mph breeze that makes it feel a bit colder. I’m wearing my light jacket under my rain jacket (as a windbreaker) and I’m quite comfortable. Waldo is in his element. His sable birthday suit is perfect for these temperatures.
In places, some of the maples have started to change color. The lows have been in the low 30s and I guess that’s been cold enough to flip the switch that tells the trees to suck in the nutrients from their leaves and begin to prepare for the deep cold of winter. When things first get cold, that’s when the change happens. Because of global warming, the date at which that happens is occurring later and later in the year.
As we pass the construction where heavy machinery has been pushing dirt around to make a new park, I look out over the Fort Meadow Reservoir. Most of the trees in the distance are still green, but those that line the shore of the reservoir are all yellow, tan and red. There’s a sea of green in the middle of which is a body of deep blue water surrounded by vibrant color. It’s beautiful.
It occurs to me that what causes this is that the shore gets colder than deeper in the forest. In the morning, when it’s the coldest, open areas, like lakes, streets and meadows, radiate away more heat than deep in the forest where trees can retain the heat by reflecting that radiation back onto the ground. Therefore, the trees nearest the lake will be subjected to colder temperatures earlier than those in the woods and will start to turn color sooner. I love it when things make sense.
I also love to think about how Mother Nature has evolved life to deal with varying circumstances. Plants were the first living things to invade dry ground, hundreds of millions of years ago. At first, it was just mosses and liverworts. Mosses and liverworts don’t have stems and leaves and grow close to the ground. Then some plants evolved the ability to make lignin. Lignin is a compound that provides a woody stiffness to structures like stems, branches and trunks. That allowed plants to grow upward toward the life-giving energy of the sun. Interestingly, the development of lignin in plants led to the second of five near-extinction events.
The thing was, the organisms that could degrade dead things didn’t know what to do with lignin. So plants died without decay and their remains were washed down into the oceans, supplying those waters with a great deal of nutrients. Plankton could deal with the lignin and they suddenly had plenty to eat. This caused a worldwide plankton bloom in the oceans that sucked all the oxygen out of the water. It’s estimated that 85% of species in the oceans then became extinct through suffocation (the same kind of thing, though to a more limited extent, happens today when fertilizer is washed into the sea where algae then blooms and causes dead zones).
On land, the undecayed plant remnants were buried and great pressure and heat turned them into coal. Later on, land organism figured the lignin thing out and decay led to the nutrients being returned to the soil where they could be reused. That means there is only a hundred million years or so, in Earth history, when coal was produced.
Anyway, trees needed to develop a way of retaining as much of their nutrients as they could through the cold days of winter. If they did nothing, the leaves would freeze and die and much of the nutrients they contained would be lost. So trees evolved to breakdown the chlorophyl and suck it back into their main parts, the trunk and roots. Then, when the leaves died, they would fall off, but the trees would retain much of their nutrients. When the chlorophyl, which gives the leaves their green color, is broken down, the underlying pigments, which are yellow, tan and red, shine through, giving the tree a change in color.
Nature is so clever at developing ways to deal with changing climates. Life always finds a way.
And she does it so beautifully.
Sassafras trees outside my balcony.