Sugar Maple Leaves Changing Colour in Autumn Canad Postcard

Sugar maple leaves turn from lush green to rich shades of red, orange, gold, yellow and burgundy. The maple leaf is an important Canadian symbol, and appears on the flag of Canada as a stylised red maple leaf like the one pictured beside the word Canada. You can edit the text if you want to write something different. Maple leaves come in many different shapes and it's not always easy to identify a tree by its leaves. The sugar maple is the leaf closest to the stylised version, which repesents the ten native maple (Acer) species in Canada. The maple leaf has been a symbol a new land back in the mid-1800s, when French settlers chose a green maple leaf as their emblem, and English Canadians chose a gold one. In 1965 the red leaf became part of the Canadian flag. The sugar maple tree produces sap in the early spring, which is made into famous Canadian maple syrup. In autumn, the trees stop producing chlorophyll, which makes the green leaf colour, and the leaves turn vibrant shades of gold, yellow, orange, red and burgundy, a fall spectacle that cloaks the landscape in colour and attracts many visitors. In a couple of weeks the leaves fall, leaving bare branches as the deciduous trees prepare to go into a dormant stage for winter. Original nature photo M Sylvia Chaume.