Photos by Richard Hamilton Smith
The maples of Hillside Cemetery down the road from my house in Center City are aflame with color. October is their fiery month, when the sedate trees that shade the headstones transform from green to gold. My daily walks now skirt the cemetery so I can stand in the presence of their radiance, drink in their brilliance.
A cemetery may seem too gloomy to entertain such a riot of color. Ten miles east, in Taylors Falls, the mood is considerably lighter. In that little town beside the St. Croix river, residents are in the midst of their annual Leaf Spectacular. Legions of visitors from the Twin Cities flock to the valley each year for its glorious fall color. They visit Interstate Park by the thousands, then they walk across Highway 8 to downtown Taylors Falls. It’s by far the busiest time of year for the sleepy village of 700. It puts on its best face to greet the tourists. Round pumpkins and rustling corn stalks adorn lamp posts and street corners, scarecrows peer from shop windows and ruby-kernelled Indian corn dangles from doorways. Shopkeepers run sales and the Rocky River Bakery turns out great quantities of fresh apple pie and hot soup to satisfy appetites whetted by the cool weather.
All of this hubbub, just for the changing colors of autumn. Of course, many festivals around the planet have their roots in the fall harvest, traditionally a time of plenty and an anticipated rest from the labors of farming. By October, farmers have cut and threshed the grain, baled the last hay, and begun to fill the cribs with orange ears of corn. These days, only the gardeners among us are still intimate with the natural rhythms of the farm. Our food—green beans, sweet corn, reasonable facsimiles of tomatoes, the fresh produce by which city people once remarked the harvest—shows less and less seasonality, as the United States imports more fruits and vegetables from southern hemisphere temperate-zone countries like Chile. In the autumn, we still have the impulse to acknowledge earth’s bounty. But we focus less on food (until Thanksgiving, that is), and our excitement attaches to the abundance of color in the maples, aspen, elm, and oak.
It’s a paradox that our merrymaking has come to focus on the changing leaves. We are not a people who typically glorify death, but that’s precisely what we’re doing when we celebrate the reds and rusts of fall. Perhaps a cemetery is the proper place to contemplate the changing leaves. It’s biology, after all.
When the verdure of summer begins to drain away, and the leaves start to fall, it represents a type of death for broad-leaved deciduous trees and for the wide spectrum of seasonally green plants. Hillside Cemetery’s maples respond to the fall equinox by shutting down, their metabolism slowing eventually to a standstill. The trigger for the onset of dormancy may be one of several environmental cues, but the most reliable—the one that doesn’t change from year to year, or place to place—is the decreasing daylight. The shorter photoperiod sets in motion physiological changes in the leaf. Most important, cells at the base of the leaf stalk begin to change and die. When they die, they close off the transport of raw materials to and from the leaf. Chlorophyll, which lends its color to the leaves through the spring and summer, breaks down and isn’t replenished. Photosynthesis is less and less possible.
With the disintegration of chlorophyll, yellow and orange pigments that had been masked by green begin to reveal their stunning color. These carotenoids were present but unseen all summer. They too play a role in photosynthesis, extending the range of sunlight a plant can use. In its miraculous process of making sugars from light, chlorophyll uses violet, blue, and red lightwaves efficiently. But not green, yellow, or orange. Carotenoids absorb wavelengths that chlorophyll cannot.
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