What season do maple leaves appear in? Analysis of the best viewing time

Red maple leaves appear in autumn, while green maple leaves appear in spring and summer. Besides being enjoyed for their beauty, the sap in the stems and leaves of maple trees can also be used as a cooking seasoning and to make candy and sweets.

The reason maple leaves turn red:

All leaves contain green chlorophyll. Trees use chlorophyll to capture light energy and, with the help of other substances in the leaves, store that light energy in the form of chemical substances such as sugars. Besides chlorophyll, many leaves also contain other pigments such as carotene, yellow pigments and red pigments. Although these pigments cannot carry out photosynthesis the way chlorophyll does, some of them can pass the light energy they capture to chlorophyll. In spring and summer, chlorophyll is present in the leaves in far greater amounts than the other pigments, so the leaves show the green color of chlorophyll, and the colors of the other pigments cannot be seen.

When autumn arrives, the days grow shorter and the nights longer, which causes the trees to begin shedding their leaves. Before the leaves fall, the trees no longer produce large amounts of chlorophyll as they do in spring and summer, and the pigments already present, such as chlorophyll, gradually break down. In this way, as the chlorophyll content gradually decreases, the colors of the other pigments gradually become visible on the leaf surface, and the leaves then take on colors such as yellow and red.

Friends who love maple leaves can go to Benxi in Liaoning, known as the “Maple Leaf Capital of China”, to admire the maple leaves in autumn.