Already, isolated areas of northern New England may hit peak color this weekend, before nature’s paintbrush meanders south.
Tourism officials and business owners are downright giddy at the prospect of a surge of “staycationers’’ and far-flung leaf-peepers. A Maine foliage hot line is fielding three times the number of calls it normally gets from tourists.
“We are off the Richter scale,’’ Gary Armitage of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel in Dixville Notch, N.H., said of the conditions there, near the Canadian border. The hotel’s vice president of sales and new business development, he said last-minute reservations are flooding in.
“It was a strange summer,’’ Armitage said, “but this outstanding fall weather is helping us economically.’’
Of course, there is a longstanding truth about foliage forecasts from those with a stake in the season: It’s always going to be a good year. Even when the leaves were downright dull in 2005 and 2007 in many places, predictions were for an impressionist palette so breathtaking that tourism officials seemed to suggest missing it would be a lifelong regret.
But this year, even scientists say the predictions are on track to be true.
The soggy spring allowed the region’s maple, ash, oak, and other trees to grow bushy with broad green leaves, which are providing larger-than-normal canvases for color.
Now, as lengthening nights signal trees to begin shutting down for the winter, the succession of warm, sunny days and cool - but not freezing - nights is providing a foundation for riotous hues.
Here’s how: Cells in the bases of leaf stems begin to die, forming a barrier that prevents many nutrients from reaching the leaf. Chlorophyll, the green pigment in leaves, begins to break down, revealing yellows the green was masking.
Those colors tend to stay fairly constant each year, but late summer’s and early autumn’s warm, sunny weather allows leaves to produce another pigment - anthocyanin - the source of vivid reds, purples, and crimsons. When they combine with the yellows already present, outstanding oranges arise.
