Unique Season of Fall Foliage

This will go down as a very unique fall color season, reports Clemson University Forest Ecologist Don Hagan. “We are starting to see some good change. We stalled out some a few weeks ago with that warm weather. I think this season is going to go down as one of the more unusual fall color seasons. When people think of good fall color their thinking of a season where you have a lot of different species and a lot of different colors kind of peaking at the same time. Everything from yellows to purples all at the same time and this isn’t necessarily going to be that kind of season and a lot of people have already noticed that. There are some good colors on individual trees and in individual locations here and there but what has happened this year that is kind of unusual is we had some trees that started changing color early, some of our more drought sensitive species. You may remember that we ended 2016 with a pretty severe drought and a lot of our trees entered 2017 still feeling that drought stress particularly some of those drought sensitive species. So, it has been an interesting year in the sense that a lot of those more drought sensitive species change colors and drop their leaves early, species like Yellow Poplar and some of the Birches. Then you have other species that are less sensitive to drought and more sensitive to day length and you can pretty much count on those species changing around the same time. Then you have your Oaks for example which are usually the latest to change and if you look around the Oaks are just now starting to change. So, it has been an interesting year in the sense that it has been kind of asynchronous; you’ve got a lot of species, you’ve seen some of good fall color in individual species but you are not seeing that whole pallet of colors happening at the same time because some species are starting early on account of the drought and some species are kind of starting late on account of the warmer weather we’ve had.” Peek fall colors in the Upstate of South Carolina normally arrive in early November. Then the leaves will start filling gutters and blanketing lawns.