If you’re one of those people who headed into late November going “where are all our fall colors this year?” did Mother Nature ever hear us!
During the past week fall didn’t so much arrive as explode in Rockdale and Central Texas.
By Thanksgiving Day the annual color change was in full gallop and over the weekend, with the arrival of a cold front, the pace turned into a sprint.
What makes them do it?
There are a couple of explanations.
Botanists say the shorter days and cooler temperatures make certain species slow down, and eventually stop, their food-making process.
That “food” is called chlorophyll—you learned about in school—and it is what makes leaves green.
No “food” and the leaves aren’t green any more as that color breaks down and the leaves turn all sorts of colors, some mild, some spectacular.
And the other explanation? It was never said any better than by a poet named Joyce Kilmer who died in World War I, the conflict whose hostilities ceased 100 years ago this Veterans Day:
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Story and photos
by Mike Brown
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