Nell Greenfield Boyce
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They're so beautiful.
People like red leaves and...
So it's been this lifetime thing, but she's on her own quest now, and that is just to understand red leaves.
Why red leaves?
Why not yellow?
So yellow is in the leaves all along.
It's kind of hiding in there.
Right.
And so you mentioned chlorophyll breaking down in the fall.
And when that happens, it's because the tree wants to recover some key nutrients like nitrogen.
Nitrogen is really precious to a plant.
It's needed for everything from photosynthesis to making proteins and DNA.
And so, you know, the tree is going dormant kind of in winter, but it doesn't want to lose that nitrogen.
It wants to hang on to it.
So the chlorophyll gets busted up.
The green is going away.
And this exposes yellow.
Right.
OK.
And scientists agree on that.