Red is a very American color—at least when it comes to autumn leaves.
In creating his "Autumn on the Hudson River," artist Jasper Francis Cropsey meticulously represented the fall colors of the native trees along the glacier-carved Hudson Valley.
But when he exhibited this monumental painting in London in 1860, critics—and, according to one oft-repeated story, perhaps even Queen Victoria—were skeptical, believing the crimson and red leaves were wildly exaggerated.
Cropsey vindicated himself by having a trunk of actual red autumn leaves shipped from America. He mounted them on cardboard and displayed them beside the painting.
The disbelief is understandable. Fall colors in Great Britain are rather drab, certainly nothing like our vivid reds.
The reason goes back to one of the great geological differences between North America and Europe. Our mountain ranges run essentially north and south. As the Ice Age glaciers moved across the continent with glacial slowness, tree species could migrate southward ahead of the cold.
Then, over the nine or ten thousand years since the ice retreated, they gradually migrated north again, recolonizing the northern United States and much of Canada.
In Europe, by contrast, many mountain ranges and major bodies of water run east to west, making that migration far more difficult. Forests similar to ours may once have flourished there, but many tree species disappeared as glaciers advanced.
Only a few—oak, beech and birch among them—managed to recolonize the British Isles before the post-glacial land bridge to the continent disappeared beneath the sea.
So autumn colors in England tend toward muted yellows and browns. But here in the northern United States—and for many of our good neighbors in Canada—we still see red.
