Planning a trip to view some of the colorful fall foliage across the nation? Here's what you should look for when identifying the various leaves:
Red Oak (Quercus rubra)Red Oak gets its name from its heavy reddish-orange wood. Red oak grows throughout Minnesota, and its acorns are an important winter food source for squirrels, deer, wild turkeys, and several songbirds.
Look for this oak’s impressive fall color, which ranges from brick red to scarlet. White oak also grows in the northern Minnesota, but has rounded lobes vs red oak’s pointed tips.
Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum)One of the most beautiful trees in the fall forest, sugar maple is also valued for its hard, fine-grained (and difficult to split) wood. The hardness of the wood gives it a second common name, rock maple!
Sugar Maple is more aptly named for the high quality sap that is collected and boiled down for maple syrup. This maple’s outstanding leaf colors of yellow, orange and red make for a memorable autumn in northern Minnesota!
Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)Quaking aspen is named for the movement of its leaves, which flutter with the slightest breeze. This is a favorite food of beavers, which eat it’s bark, twigs and leaves!
Leaves of lime green in the early spring, quaking aspen leaves turn a beautiful golden yellow in the fall!
Large Toothed Aspen (Populus grandidentata)As its scientific and common names imply, this aspen has "big teeth" on the edges of its leaves. Fall color is mixed, being green, chartreuse, and gold all at once.
Like quaking aspen, its leaves flutter easily in the slightest breeze, and its white trunks speckled with black marks make it stand out in the late autumn skyline.
Basswood (Tilia americana)American Basswood, also known as American Linden is a favorite tree of bees and makes a very high-quality honey. Fall color is often green or chartreuse, but may be yellow or golden yellow in exceptional years. Basswood flowers mature into rounded fruits that ripen by late summer, which change to golden yellow in autumn, and beige in winter. Fruits are eaten by wildlife.
Green Ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica)You have to look quickly in September too see the colors of this tree. Green ash is one of the first trees to change color and drop its leaves in autumn.
Green Ash is named for the color of its leaves -- green on both sides of the leaf, and because its autumn coloration has a lot of green in it. Fall color is usually green-yellow, but can be golden-yellow in good years.
Red Maple (Acer rubrum)Red Maple is named for its red winter twigs and buds, red spring flowers, red summer petioles and red fall foliage.
Red Maple, like Silver Maple, has silvery undersides to its leaves, which are easily exposed in the breeze to create a bicolor effect. Red Maple has blazing red fall color, but trees found may display bright yellow, orange-red, or red fall color.
White Oak (Quercus alba)Named for the light color of its bark, white oak is easily identified by the rounded lobe leaves and unique acorns. Under the right conditions, the fall foliage can be reddish-brown.
The acorns only take a single season to develop, a prime characteristic of the White Oak group. Acorns fill out in the summer and ripen in mid-autumn, often with heavy crops.
Courtesy of the USDA Forest Service.
