Tree Hugging

As you are presumably aware from good old GCSE biology, chlorophyll is responsible for photosynthesis but it’s also green and so it’s responsible for masking the yellow pigments (xanthophylls) and the orange pigments (carotenoids) that are present in the leaves throughout the growing season.

There’s a particularly good red tree on the way up the hill but red’s not quite the same as orange and yellow; in this case the red colour comes from sugars that are trapped in the leaf when it stops photosynthesising.

This isn’t a small scale operation either. A fully-grown Oak in the UK grows - and sheds - 250,000 leaves every year and produces around 50,000 acorns in a good year.

But trees are for life not just for autumn and thus there must be some more good stuff about them out there for the fact loving amongst us to devour. Aside from looking pretty trees do of course have economic uses.

Canadian aspen trunks are made into about a million matchsticks but it’s not always that efficient; it takes two tonnes of timber to make one tonne of paper. Left to their own devices though trees are pretty efficient; your average mature tree can transpire 454 litres of water a day!

Long before green peace got on the case the original ‘Tree Huggers’ were letting us know how important trees are for the environment. In the late 70s peasant women in Northern India would join hands around trees in an attempt to halt deforestation, their group was known as the chipko movement (‘to cling’ in Hindi).

Presumably they appreciated all the good stuff about trees, not least in these carbon-footprint-conscious times that a mature tree can provide enough oxygen each year for a family of 4 for a day; so we need a lot of trees.

Worryingly though the average life span of a tree in an urban area is only eight years in which case maybe we should all get on the case and do some hugging.

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