Ep. 229 Why Leaves Change in the Fall and Which Trees Do It Best | #Good Growing

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Mac Omb, Illinois, and we have got a full on episode for you today. I think last week I said we had a garden bite. Well, psych. Today, we are going to be talking about fall color trees.

Last week, we talked about the leaves and and, you know, what is our process? What are some recommendations? What are some ways you can handle fall leaves on your property? But let's talk about the fall leaves themselves and the colors and the like in our favorite trees out there. And you know I'm not doing this by myself.

I am joined as always every single week by horticulture educator Ken Johnson in Jacksonville. Hey, Ken.

Hello, Chris. Say the leaves are are starting to change now, I guess in earnest, much more quickly than they have been, at least here in Jacksonville.

Indeed, they are. Yes. I think a little bit of rain, a little bit of cool weather has maybe helped to spur on some of this this leaf change. I I will say I still have a fair amount of I already have a lot of leaves on the ground. A lot of them are just brown or green.

I think they just dropped because it was dry or the plant was starting to give up. So I'm already doing a lot of raking and moving stuff around.

So we haven't no raking yet, but I think we're we're even close, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm. Well, I today, we are gonna cover a couple things, you know, everything from what's happening inside the leaves to, you know, some of our favorite fall colored green trees out there, or maybe ones of note that that people can try. But Kent, before we were talking, were like, well, which is it?

Are we in the season of of autumn, or we are are we in the season of fall? And then went down a rabbit hole of what do these words mean? Where do they come from? So you uncovered, like, a pretty good, like, origin story for these words. If you wouldn't mind sharing that, please.

Yes. So this is from Forest Fridays. So this is from the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry Department of Conservation and Natural Resources or the DCNR, called the falling for autumn. Now on this, anyhow, they kinda talk about the origin of these terms. So fall is, I guess, just generally speaking, fall is usually what Americans use.

Autumn is more British people. I guess fall is is considered more informal. Autumn is more formal. You guys said the at the I guess the most basic sense there. I mean, here they talked about so even before there was we referred to this current season that we're in as fall or autumn, They used to be harvest or harfest, in old English.

So that comes from, Germanic origin, meaning picking, plucking, or reaping. So the act of, taking crops and preserving them for the winter. Then in the fifteen hundreds, we started seeing fall enter into the lexicon. And this was actually like fall of the leaf would be in the fall and then spring of the leaf in spring. So that's how we would get fall and spring there.

But then sometime in the end of sixteen hundreds, autumn, from French and then Latin kind of started to overtake fall at least in in England and and stuff. So that is kind of what's used over there in autumn is the because from Latin, which is the passing of the year. So that's how I get those terms.

Well, I just love these having fall autumn. Now I'm gonna use the harvest because when I'm writing articles and I keep using the same word fall over and over again, and then you have about, well, falling leaves and fall and and you know what? Having a few synonyms helps. So I love having a couple different names for one season. Yeah.

Because it's it's like we have spring, we have summer, we have autumn slash fall, then we have winter. So, yeah, we're in a season of many names right now.

Yes. And the only season that has more than one name, at least in the English language.

Yes. Oh, yeah. There's and most definitely, you know, other cultures, other languages, we they have their own names for the the passing of the season. So, yeah, if you know of those, throw those in the chat down below. Well, Ken, as everything turns, as we hit, hair vest, or autumnus, or fjallen, as as I've these old words here, What is happening in the leaves?

And I think this is we're we're gonna probably boil this down to a very simple, like, process here. There's a lot of things that are happening in terms of, like, different types of pigments that are being revealed, like families of pigments. We're gonna boil them down into like this, this, and that. So I think if we go into like the process of why leaves change color, and then we're gonna dive into the specific trees here in a second, but why leaves are changing color is when we look at a green leaf on a tree, I I when I first learned about this, it kind of made my mind kind of turn on itself a little bit. But that color of green is not being absorbed by the plant, it's being reflected by the plant.

So the the chlorophyll pigment is not technically absorbing that green color spectrum. It's reflecting it back to our eyeballs. So that those photons are going away from us, but it is absorbing those other colors, you know, red, blue, yellow, orange. It is absorbing those pigments from the the color spectrum and converting those into from light energy into chemical energy. And I was like, wow.

So you mean, like, the things that colors that like, the colors that things are is really a reflection of a pigment. It's like it's like the that object is saying, no, not that color, and that's what we see. I just thought that was always really interesting. But chlorophyll, to our eyes, is green because it's not absorbing that particular spectrum of the the the wavelength. And so but that's it's not by itself.

There there are other pigments in there that are revealed once we hit the the fall or autumn or harvest season. And in order to reveal these pigments, first, the leaves have to die. And this is a process that it goes through called senescence. And senescence is is really just kind of the breaking down of more complex molecules, carbohydrates and proteins and things like that, breaking it down into, like, basic sugars and amino acids. And as the leaf begins to senesce, it resorbs this material back into the tree itself.

The tree is trying to recover or recoup as much energy as it can from that leaf. Because that leaf has been the cafeteria all summer long. It's been producing food, energy, and it's taking that to store it to then produce that leaf material for next year and continue the process or that cycle of life for that tree. And so as all of these things are resorbing into the tree, the tree is also creating this abscission layer at the base of the petiole of the leaf, and this abscission layer is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and it's becoming more and more restrictive. And certain products, chemicals, suddenly start getting clogged up in like a traffic jam, and not everything makes it back into the tree.

And so the subscision layer forms, and once it fully forms, that's when that leaf is technically completely separated from the tree and it falls to the ground. But as the chlorophyll fades, because the chlorophyll is the most dominant pigment, as it fades, it begins to reveal other pigments out there such as carotenoids, which are more responsible for our oranges and yellows. We also do have the sort of the coppery or the brown colors, those are tannins, which might be more of like a waste product than an actual pigment that's absorbing photons and converting that to chemical energy. But we see that a lot in our like beech trees, our oak trees, And it's believed that the leaf holds onto these tannins to make them bitter to insect feeding and other herbivory. And then finally, we have kind of the well, I don't know, sometimes the star of the show, the anthocyanins.

These are the kind of the bright reds, purple, crimson colors that a lot of our trees will produce. Now, anthocyanin is a little bit variable year to year. Carotenoids, they're pretty consistent. Know, when we get fall color trees that are yellow and orange, it's like, yeah, we expect to see that. Anthocyanin is a little bit variable because it's something that forms in this part of the year, in in the fall time of year.

It's basically an an increase in as plant sugars accumulate in the leaves, that abscission layer is getting smaller and smaller, and that leaf is starting to turn red with this anthocyanin pigment that is that is there. Now it's believed like, well, why do trees do this? Well, maybe it is something to warn leaf feeding insects or other mammals, like, don't eat this because red can be a warning color. It also helps to protect that leaf as it takes that last little bit of energy out of the leaf, it helps protect it from UV light, so any type of degradation in that way. But but really, when it comes to a lot of these pigments, we usually get our best fall color on the South or Southwest side of the trees because light energy equals sugar because that's what the leaf is doing, it's producing food.

So so, yeah, that's just like a really rough quick rundown of what's happening inside that leaf. Ken, I'm sure there's so many things left on the table here. What any other critical things I forgot?

No. I think that sums it up pretty well. And like and you said, you know, color can be variable depending on a lot of times depending on the weather for those anthocyanins. So if we want really good fall leaf color, we're looking at consistent moisture throughout the year, which we haven't had this year, so I wouldn't be surprised if our fall color isn't quite as good as it normally is, although we have gotten a little bit of rain. And then we want warm sunny days and cool, but not freezing nights in the fall.

So that's kind of the recipe for our ideal fall color.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. The non the freezing temperatures at night. That's the other thing the anthocyanins do because of that buildup of sugar. The plant sugar is like a natural antifreeze.

It helps to give that tree a little bit extra time in the cold cold weather. So there's there's another added thing. Yeah.

So yeah. So right now we've got, you know, we got the good weather. It's just still pretty warm. You know, it's been, well, with the exception of Saturday, pretty cloud free as of late and we're starting to get cool down into the forties, upper thirties, but not freezing yet. All of is just going to depend I think on the moisture.

Yeah. So

If we got just a little bit more rain in September, and by a little bit, I think to catch up, they said by the October, at least here in Macomb, we need somewhere like between like six to eight inches between, what is it now, October 21 and October 31, which unlikely to happen. But but, yeah, if it would rain right now, well, that would probably bring other things like wind and stuff, which would then as that abscission layer is being created, it is weakening that connection of the leaf to the tree itself. And so things like wind and rain will dislodge that leaf early. So, yeah, if only we had that rain in September, and then we had this, like we have a perfect stretch of fall weather for autumn leaf color. See how I use the two words there?

We it's now, it's in the sixties. It's during the day and at night, we're getting down to, like, forties. In a few nights, we're gonna get down to 35, at least here in Macomb. Like, not freezing yet. It's just it would be perfect weather if only we had moisture in the ground earlier.

Maybe next year. That's the that's the gardener's eternal hope. Maybe next year.

Yeah. So now that so now that we know how, fall color comes to be, there are so I think maples, you know, when people think fall color, it's it's maples. Maple, maple, maple. Maples everywhere. And I think and we've talked about this in the past.

You know, maples are, in a lot of places, maybe a little over planted. Know, we everybody was planting elms, those died. We replaced those with ash. Ash are dying and now we're replacing all those with maple in a lot of places. So, and I mean, I mean, maples are are good just good trees especially for fall color, a lot of them.

But there are other trees, that do also produce some really good fall color and I think quite a few of these are pretty underrepresented. I think it would be safe to say, in a lot of a lot of our landscapes, urban landscapes and stuff like that. So I think we've got like six here that we'll talk about and this is not an an exhaustive list. And we're only doing trees. We're not talking about shrubs, which is a whole another podcast.

Maybe next year. Maybe next year. Yeah. You'll have to keep listening. Yep.

So as soon as we go through the list, like so one of them we've got here would be black Tupelo, so Nissa sabbatica. She probably had Emily come on Yeah. To talk about this one, but

Let's give her a call real quick.

So this is a is a native tree. I think think all of them but one we're going to talk about are native trees. That's just kind of the the angle, the additional angle we took for this list. So sort of medium sized tree, thirty, fifty feet tall, twenty, thirty feet wide. It's got nice foliage kind of year round though, not just in the fall.

So we got the dark green kind of glossy leaves and during the summer, during the growing season, and then moving into fall, now we start getting yellow, orange, red leaf color in the fall. That can be pretty striking, again, if we have good conditions. They do like moist soils, but well drained. Acidic soils would be another more or more acidic soils than maybe some some other trees would like. They do also have fruit that the birds will feed on, so dark blue fruit as well.

So you kind of get a multi use out of this. Got your good fall color, attractive summer foliage, then food for wildlife as well.

Wow. Look this up. Are black gums dioecious? I know I knew this fact at one point in time. See this, you don't use it, you lose it.

The one thing about black gum trees also is that they are daiiche. So if you want that fruit, you'll need to plant a female tree and hopefully have a male tree nearby or plant both. And I would I what what I've heard about black gums and their fruit, you know, everyone's, you know, really nervous about, you know, fruiting trees. They try to avoid that. In fact, the the green industry actively selects against female trees.

They want the male trees because they don't fruit, they don't produce a mess, so to speak. They just produce a lot of pollen. And so the black gum fruit, from what I've been told, people who have that that tree, they like they never see that fruit. Like, the birds come in, sort of gobble it up before it ever hits the ground. So I have just recently planted a black gum in my front yard last year.

I've been trying to keep it well watered throughout this year, and we do have some, like, striking red fall color on it. And I I'm excited to hopefully, this tree is gonna make it through kind of a stressful couple of dry years and and get established in my front yard. I've also will say I've seen them leaf out in the spring, and they have a red spring color as well, which I I have pictures of. I can post that right now. It's like this really neat red color as the leaves are expanding in the spring.

Three, four season interest.

Now you got all kinds of All the seasons. Super tolerant of different soil conditions. Like, I think they were mostly found naturally in like the wet soils in Southern Illinois, but you can plant them in upland soils. So they're tolerant of a wide variety of spots in your yard.

So you mentioned, fruit and people not liking them. So this next tree, is probably probably up there on people's list of trees they don't like, for fruit anyway. At least at least when they come talk to me about them. Anyway, that's, sweet gum. So this is another, native tree, a little bit, larger, about 50 to 60 feet tall, 40 to 40 to 50 foot spread on these.

They've got star shaped leaves. So this is this is one I can actually identify relatively easy, looking at the leaves. And again, they've got a nice fall color range, yellow to orange to red, purple, sometimes they all that within the same plant. I'll say for us, the house behind us has a sweet gum right on the property line. I see mostly yellow leaves on that one, at least they're falling into our yard.

Just want to take a closer look to see if we've got other colors. Maybe because the yellow just stands out more, the purple may blend in a little bit more with some of the other, with the mulch and things like that. They are relatively fast growing trees. So that can be, you know, if you want shade a little bit quicker, this may be a good one to look at. And they do, will tolerate a wide range of soil conditions.

Then they do produce the fruit. A lot of people love hate, probably.

Sweet gum balls, everyone's favorite, right?

Leading towards hay. I like them. I don't I don't have any issues with But ours is ours are falling, we've made a garden bed in there, so they're just falling into the bed and I still walk through there barefoot and after they've broken down a little bit, it doesn't hurt. That's bad. Really?

Too much. There are some, there are cultivars that produce fewer fruits. Rotunda Loba is one, but that's not reliably winter hardy in a lot of the state. So, and I mean, you do hear about stuff, you know, people spraying stuff on the trees to prevent that, the fruit set and flowering and stuff, but the timing, you have to get that just right to do that. If you miss that window and that's not a very big window, it's not going to work.

And I've had, we've had people come into the office, you know, wanting to know how they can prevent the gumballs and you tell them that like, well, we're probably just going to cut the trees down. And these were large, mature trees. That That's so sad. Yeah. See, I mean and you can I mean, they they can be, like I say, you know, a pain in it?

I would probably not be quite as fond of them, you know, if it was in my yard when I'm trying to mow them up and drop them in the grass and stuff. But, mean, they can be raked to, like like, your leaves and stuff.

Yeah. I so right next to my new baby black gum, it is actually replacing a green ash, which was killed by emerald ash borer. And right next to this is a sweet gum tree. Big, tall, mature sweet gum tree. And I feel like sweet gum has followed me in my life from when I was down in Carbondale starting college, out living in Kansas, out there for years, and now back here in Macomb, that I've always had a sweet gum tree somewhere nearby, parking my car under it or somewhere in the yard.

And and I was so happy that we had one in our yard at our house that we own now. I I absolutely love it. It's one of my favorite trees. Unfortunately, because we did lose the green ash, which was also large and mature, the sweet gum, you know, trees will support each other. They'll shade each other in terms of, like, wind also resistance.

So the sweet gum, with the loss of this tree right next to it, has had to really rebound from, like, having sort of just like an open now exposed side to it that it did not have before. And so it's really struggled a little bit. It probably requires a little bit of pruning. Need to get an arborist out there to take care of some some some just parts of the tree that just were like, woah. Where'd all this wind and sunlight come from?

And so it sort of has aborted some of those interior branches, I think, because of that. But this this the gumballs, like, I think they they look like something out of an alien movie. There's little little spikes, little points there. So at the base of each one, the tree produces a seed, and birds will come in and pull out the seeds there. So, like, they are bird food.

They they are a valuable part of the ecosystem. I I would probably curse the sweet gumballs if I, like, would slide or slip on one and break an ankle, definitely. So, yeah, you do have to maybe rake them up, push them over to one side where you won't be walking. I've thrown them in the bonfire before, the the fire pit, and you know what? One of the few things remaining at the end of the fire, the sweet gumballs are like the burnt husks leftovers of them.

So they are a little resilient to break down. And but it is a favorite tree of mine. I love the fall color. Hopefully, we'll get good fall color this year on ours. And if if if it's coloring up right now, I'll take some pictures and throw them in here as well.

But I'll have pictures of sweet gums from past places.

Yeah. So the bird's must do a pretty good job of getting those seeds because in our don't have sweet gum popping up in our yard or in those beds really at all. Maybe occasional one here and there, you know, we've got some areas, you know, there's those gumballs are two, three deep

Yeah. Snow. Yeah. Just if you got a sweet gum tree, take a look at the base. There should be a little hollow spot where that seed used to be a bird pulled it out or a little critter.

Ken, what do you got next for us?

Next, Thomas, there's one that we don't you see probably you see more natural areas, not necessarily in landscapes, that's sassafras. And this one is, it can get pretty big, 30 to 60 feet tall, 35 to 40 feet wide. But they will, will will sucker, and they can form thickets and stuff, which is probably why we don't see them in landscapes, more formal landscapes like yards and stuff, than we would, a lot of these other trees. So typically more natural areas, is where you're going to encounter these. They do have, this is one where you have three different shaped leaves.

So you got an entire leaf, a mitten shaped and three lobed. And we can, if we can find pictures, we'll throw those, in here. So this is one that could be somewhat confusing when you're identifying. But for fall color, we get the yellow to orange to red and purple. So again, it can be variable as to what colors you're getting, but it still produces a nice display on those.

And then, you know, back in the day, Sassafras was your kind of the the historical version of root beer. So for that, you're taking the roots and making a syrup, and then they would ferment that to make old old timey root beer. But there is a chemical in that, what is that called? Saffrol, which is a known carcinogen. So nowadays FDA has banned Saffrol in food and drinks, now it's your root beer comes from sources that do not have that or the saffrol has been removed or or stuff like that.

So Yeah. While while you could go make this yourself, just keep in mind that it does contain a a no carcinogen if you're gonna make your own sassafras drink.

I think there used to be a sassafras festival down Southern Illinois, and it that that whole thing put the damper on the whole festival because they used to do all kinds of sassafras items. It like, you can go beyond root beer, I think, and some of the people have made from sassafras in the past. But, yeah, put a little bit of a damper on that. I wonder if they still have it. I I I thought they did, but, yeah, they might have some alternatives or way maybe ways to extract that chemical.

I'm I'm not sure. But yeah.

Yeah. I'm not sure if you can remove that or not. I didn't go down a rabbit hole that deep.

Oh, leave that one for later, Ken. Yeah. I I did grow up the my folks' property did have a grove of sassafras trees on them, and it it was interesting. So they they did have a district forester come out and take a look at them, and he actually flagged all of these sassafras trees. I had no idea they were just kind of like beyond where you would think it would be, just like these little sassafras trees.

And they never lived very long. And he said that's pretty typical in our neck of the woods. They grow up, they they live for a few years, and then they die back, but they'll just resprout from a different spot as part of this larger colony. And so, yeah, I I was surprised to see that in my hometown where I grew up in Quincy. And I'll say the other sassafras related thing that I've dealt with is I did a tree inventory once in Quincy, and this one tree was just stumping me.

I couldn't figure it out, and it was a a gigantic tree. I've never seen a tree like this before. I've never seen bark like this before. I don't think I have pictures of this because it was for a company I was working for, but I'd never seen bark like this and the leaves were all weird and wacky, like Ken described, three different shapes. And I finally figured out, like, took me weeks to figure this out.

It was a sassafras tree, like a mature large sassafras tree, which again, I'd never seen that before. It had me stumped.

Yeah. I forgot to mention the other they have a spicy smell to them. Yes. I don't think I know if I've ever smelled it. So now when I'm out in the woods somewhere and I see it, if I can properly identify it, I'll have to scratch it and see what it smells like.

The next on our list is Sourwood. So this is another one east native to Eastern US. A little bit maybe a shorter tree, 20 to 50 feet tall. And landscapes tends to be on that lower end. A little bit narrower, 10 to 25 feet wide for this one.

Yellow to red to maroon fall color. And they'll also produce fragrant flowers in the spring. So you're gonna kind of multi use, multi season attractiveness to this plant. Like it's well drained, maybe a little more acidic soils as well.

This is one I've never grown before, but I've heard of Sourwood and it's it's it is a I think it would fit within my landscape where I already have a lot of mature trees. Maybe I can like tuck this in somewhere or still get some sun, but it it can hang out with some of the the the big guys out there too.

Alright. Next, we don't have a a single species here, but a group. That's the oaks. I think a lot of times we overlook oaks for fall color, and I think a lot of times we think of there's brown leaves. But a lot of them, white oak, swamp white, northern red, pin, black, shumard, they all have, can all have good colors, again, but they can be kind of inconsistent depending on what the weather and stuff's been like.

Scarlet Oak is another one that can have scarlet, like name implies scarlet, to red purple leaves on them as well. So I think don't overlook don't overlook oaks when it comes to to fall color. They can have some pretty impressive displays.

Yeah. I I think as a as a grouping too, or if you are able to stand back either on an overlook or looking up on a hillside of oaks, like all the coppery, tans, and browns, they together, they create a really, I think, impressive display. Now my pin oaks I have in my yard are not that impressive. Usually, they're a dark, leathery green, and they fall sometimes still green like right now when it's so dry, or they'll just turn brown and fall. It's it's not that impressive.

Ken, you mentioned, like, the the variability. Like, you're you're not quite sure what you're gonna get year to year. I did get a phone call from a retired arborist, and he was so excited about his swamp white oak. And he said, can you come out and and look at this tree? So I did.

And he said, for the last three year like, just planted this tree. And he said, for the last three years since I planted this tree, I've had bright red fall color. I went out and sure enough, bright red fall color on the swamp white oak, which can happen, but it's so variable. You know, you it's like a box of chocolates. You don't know what you're gonna get when you're growing these things.

So he has had a reliably red fall color on his swamp white oak year for the last three well, we'll just go see if it's four years now.

There you go. Or he's got a special one.

Yes. A special cultivar one. I don't think so. I think it was wild. But yeah.

Yeah. We'll see.

Alright. And then last one at least for today. At least that we have on the list. Maybe we'll talk about more. This is this is the one non native that we put on here, that's in Ginkgo.

We we could argue native though, if we wanna go back far enough in time.

So this is, you know, the the quote unquote living fossil. So they've been around for this species has been around for two hundred million or so years, thought to be extinct and they were discovered in China. They grow fifty, eighty feet tall, 30 to 40 feet wide. They have kind of cool fan leaf leaves. So those are, those are pretty attractive.

And these are like a bright yellow gold color in the fall. And the cool thing about those, as they drop all the leaves at once or within a day or two of each other, usually around a hard freeze. So it's not like a lot of trees where you're, you know, you're out raking and then you go back next weekend and the next weekend as they continue to drop leaves. This is a kind of a one and done type thing. Mhmm.

I guess could be good or bad depending on your your perspective. I guess from your raking perspective, it's you're done all at one time. This is another one where you've got separate male and female plants. For most of our people are planting males because they do produce a quote unquote fruit. It's not actually a fruit because these are are gymnosperms.

They're not angiosperms. So these are related to like pines and conifers, stuff like that. That is rather stinky, we'll say. So typically, you're planting males, but you can't I don't think you can tell until they start getting bigger if you've got a male or female. So

I still say I think some some botanists have maybe disproven this that they can change sexes kind of like the the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, life will find a way. But I have seen this occur, Ken, at a retired colleague's house, Dave Robson. He had his neighbors had a ginkgo tree, it was mature, very large tree, and it was male. For years and years, male, no fruit production, and then there was a branch that grew out over his driveway, one single branch. And he said one year that branch started producing fruit.

Had not happened before. And so that just makes me wonder, did life find a way? I don't know.

So yeah. But yeah. Probably maybe wanna avoid the females because they will be stinky.

They smell. People eat it though. Yeah. So it's I guess perspective. Yeah.

To each their own. And and I landscape maintenance people, they do love this tree, you know, from that perspective because they can come out to the parks and say, alright, the gingko's done. Get it up. Get the leaves out. And then I love it because it's like you go from, like, bright yellow tree to, like, bright yellow carpet.

Mhmm. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. Those leaves seem a little bit thicker. A lot of others. Like, when we've we've gone around collecting leaves, we've wound wound up with some bags with ginkgo. And those don't seem to shred quite as well as some of the others.

Maybe it was just that one year they weren't fully kind of dried out like some of the others.

I'd say they're more leathery. Yeah. I I've even seen when they don't make it to that yellow fall color, and they just drop when they're green right after a frost. And they're pretty tough. Yeah.

I mean, you gotta be tough if you got dinosaurs chewing on you. So yeah. Surviving the meteor impact.

Yeah. So and, you know, surviving natural, there's not a whole lot that eats them. Mm-mm. Which again, depending on your perspective is is good or bad. You're not really providing food for wildlife necessarily, or they don't support insect populations.

There's one side of that argument. The other side is you don't have to worry about anything eating it.

Yeah. And they're very tolerant of urban soil conditions and pollution, and they still sequester carbon like a good tree. Well, Ken, that that was a really good list. Do we have any other honorable mentions? Anything that you can think of as you're looking around your yard or driving to the office every morning that's like like, oh, I do like that one.

Redbud, they can have nice and there's lot of cultivars with that too. I'll say the redbuds in my yard this year are actually blooming now. I've got a few flowers here and there. I'm assuming probably because of the drought and they're stressed. I have to see how well they bloom in the spring if they're pushing out.

It's not a whole lot, but there's just a few clusters of flowers here and there on them. Yeah. They're

desperate to produce fruit right now because something bad might be coming along or they're like, oh, man, I'm running out of energy. I need to reproduce.

Yeah. I'm trying to think. Honey locust. And my parents have one of those in the yard. Nice yellow color.

Do you have to deal with the giant seed pods? So if you don't like sweet gum, you're probably not gonna like like that one.

My my flowery dog, Wood, usually puts on a nice fall show. And then I drive by every day is two bald cypress, and they turn like a copper color. And I think it's I think they're gorgeous, especially in the early and late hours of the day when the sun this rising or setting sun hits them just right. I think they're absolutely gorgeous. I love seeing them.

Sure there's more out there, but that's if we're if we're ignoring maples.

It's on purpose.

Those are are the two that I, you know, I see that I that come to mind right away. Yeah.

And I don't mind I'd you know what? Go go ahead again.

Say white pine. White pine. Their their older needles are turning yellow. Yeah.

They're they're bicolored right now. Yes. They have two colors. Green and brown.

And that's supposed to happen as long as it's the older new needles. If it's the new stuff, then you should be worried about.

Yeah. And I we we're throwing shade at the maples. I I love a a good fall color of a sugar maple. Nothing wrong with a red maple, fall color. What most people have is a hybridized maple.

It's something in their yard. Usually, it's bred for the red fall color and then the aggressive growth habit of silver maple and then the nasty surface roots of just maples in general again. But yeah. Oh, and then you have Crimson King Norway maple, which which we don't recommend. It's it's non native.

It's invasive. Well, it is invading our natural forest systems, not legally invasive in Illinois yet. Problematic. Problematic. I like that word.

But that is an example of a tree that produces anthocyanins all year long. It's got that purple leaf color.

Yes. I have one in my front yard.

I have a dead one in my front yard and a live one in the back.

I think it's ugly. Leaf should be green.

I'll bring my verticillium wilt infested wood chips to you, Ken.

It's just got a nice big frost crack on it. I'm hoping it. And it keeps getting it's starting to heal it, but it's Mhmm. It's pretty big. I may just girdle it one of these days and plant a vine, have a vine grow up until the tree falls.

Oh, poison ivy. I saw I saw a beautiful poison ivy vine the other day growing up a dead tree. And it had berries. It had yeah. It's got it's got to be a very nice one.

Yeah. Just because it makes it itchy. Doesn't make it sound a useful plant for other things.

It has red fall color.

Berries and Virginia creeper is another one. Red purple that people don't like, I've got that growing in our backyard. I just leave it. But it's pretty it's pretty small right now. Oh, couple careful.

Give me couple of years.

I can be mean to that plant and it's it's okay with it. So it just comes right back more bigger and better than ever. So yeah. Well, I guess we went down we went down off the off the beaten path there onto our own side path of honorable mention. So I I guess, folks, if you have a favorite fall tree, you know, native, otherwise, and if it's a maple, yeah, feel free to list it in the down below in the chat.

Well, that was a lot of great information about fall leaves, autumn leaves, or the harvest season, and, you know, what's happening in the leaves, some of our favorite native or maybe used to be native trees a couple million years ago, if we're talking about ginkgo. Well, Good Growing podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. Hey, Ken. Thanks for hanging out, talking about some of our favorite, you know, fall coloring trees out there and and learning me some, like, you know, how we why we say fall or autumn or why I'm going to now start saying harvest season. So thanks, Ken.

Yes. If you're ever on Jeopardy or it comes up in your trivia night, remember where you learned it from. And let's do this again next week.

Oh, we shall do this again next week. It's spooky season is coming to a head, folks, so that you know what that means. Some folks are getting dressed up. And we'll be talking about should we say, Ken? I guess we might as well say.

Parasites. We're gonna be talking about parasites with doctor Casey Athey, our extension entomologist. So that will be a fun one next week. Well, listeners, thank you for doing what you do best and that is listening or if you watched us on YouTube watching. And as always, keep on growing.