Why do Americans drive hours to look at leaves?

What leaf peeping actually is

Driving, mostly. You get in the car, you go north or uphill, you look at hillsides, you stop for cider doughnuts, you photograph a covered bridge, you come home. There is no ticket and no gate. It is one of the few American leisure activities that nobody has yet worked out how to charge admission for, although the inns, the diners and the petrol stations do very well out of it.

It is a bigger business than it looks

New Hampshire’s Division of Travel and Tourism Development forecast 3.9 million visitors between late September and November 2026, spending around $2 billion, both figures up on the previous year. In that state, fall draws more visitors than winter, skiing included. Towns across northern New England lean on those few weeks, for a product that falls off the trees for free and cannot be scheduled.

Why he did not understand the premise

France is not short of trees. It has forests older than the republic and an autumn that is perfectly pleasant. What it does not have is the idea that the leaves are a destination. A French autumn is for mushrooms, for the grape harvest, for game on the menu. You go into the woods to bring something back. Driving three hours to look at a hillside and bring back nothing struck him as either very spiritual or very American, and he was not yet sure which.

The colour is the difference

Then we got there, and he went quiet, which is his highest form of praise. A New England hillside in mid-October is red. Not russet, not gold: red, with orange and yellow around it. European forests in autumn are overwhelmingly yellow and brown. He had seen autumn every year of his life and had never seen that, and he said so, once, to the windscreen.

Why American leaves are red and European ones are not

Yellow is what is left when the green chlorophyll breaks down. Red is different: it comes from anthocyanins, pigments the tree makes on purpose in autumn. In 2009 Simcha Lev-Yadun and Jarmo Holopainen proposed in the journal New Phytologist that trees evolved red leaves as a defence against insects, and that the trait survived where the trees and their insects could retreat south together during the ice ages. In North America and East Asia the mountain chains run north to south, so they could. In Europe the Alps run east to west and blocked the way. Many species died out, and the pressure to turn red went with them.

A caution about that theory

It is a hypothesis, and the authors said so themselves: there is no settled agreement on why trees turn red at all. But it fits the map neatly. The places famous for autumn colour are eastern North America and East Asia, including Japan, where people have gone out to look at maples for more than a thousand years. Western Europe, with the same latitude and plenty of forest, never developed the habit, possibly because there was less to look at.

What we brought back

Nothing, as predicted. A bag of doughnuts that did not survive the drive, and about two hundred photographs that look the same. He has since described the trip to his mother as “a pilgrimage to trees,” which I think was meant as a criticism and came out as a recommendation.

Autumn, two ways

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