True colors
Forecast for splendid fall foliage gives tourism industry hope for rebound
Financial market meltdowns. Painfully high gas and food prices. Tom Brady's knee. OK, maybe it won't be a perfect autumn, but at least you won't be able to blame Mother Nature.
Horticulturists and arborists say the weather conditions over the last few months have conspired in Greater Boston's favor and are promising what could be a fall foliage season for the ages. That prospect has inn operators, restaurateurs, and local business groups hopeful for a busy season of tourists trying to wash away their worldly stresses in a flood of brilliant yellow, orange, and red hues.
"It's just been absolutely perfect," said Scott LaFleur, director of horticulture for the New England Wild Flower Society, headquartered at the Garden in the Woods preserve and botanical museum in Framingham. "This is setting the stage for an incredible fall."
With many budget-conscious travelers opting for local vacations, inspired by high fuel prices and the weak dollar, local businesses that depend on tourism are hoping that a postcard-perfect foliage season will give them an economic shot in the arm.
"In this kind of economy, you have to be engaged in creative initiatives to attract more visitors, and foliage season is the perfect time to do that in our area," said Ted Welte, president and chief executive officer of the MetroWest Chamber of Commerce, based in Framingham. "We'd like to have people come for the leaves and then stay to discover other attractions we have here, like the Danforth Museum or the Garden in the Woods."
LaFleur and other tree experts say the groundwork for the promising foliage season was laid this summer, when the same wet weather that dampened Cape Cod vacations with regularity also created a region full of well-hydrated trees. Unlike during drought years, sugar maples, red maples, birches, and oaks didn't shed leaves early in self-preservation.
As if on cue, he said, the rains mostly stopped after Labor Day. Then the nights turned colder. And not simply colder, LaFleur said, but just chilly enough to encourage the trees to start transforming the sugar in their sap into anthocyanin (a leaf pigment) without producing the kind of early frosts that can dull color.
All that's left, he said, is for the shorter, dryer, and cooler days to work their magic by persuading the trees to ramp down their production of chlorophyll, the chemical that makes photosynthesis possible and gives leaves their green color.
The end of photosynthesis is key, LaFleur said, because foliage trees don't so much change their color as reveal it. Yellow and orange pigments such as carotenoids and xanthophylls are always present in leaves but are overpowered during the warmer months by green chlorophyll.
"One of the nice things about autumn is that it's the actual, true colors of the trees that are coming out," he said. "As October comes and we're getting ready to put our costumes on, the trees are getting ready to take theirs off."
Foliage season in the Boston suburbs usually begins in early October and peaks a week or two before Halloween. This year, the experts said, the season could be both more brilliant and longer than usual thanks to the favorable weather, perhaps as long as a month.
That would be just fine with Bob Purrington, who is retiring as innkeeper at Longfellow's Wayside Inn, just off Route 20 in Sudbury. Overseeing his last foliage season after nearly 20 years running the historic establishment - which was founded in 1716 and made famous by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as the setting for his 1863 collection of poems, "Tales of a Wayside Inn" - Purrington said he is expecting a banner fall.
"This is our season coming up," said Purrington, who will be handing the reins of the nonprofit state landmark over to new innkeeper Bob Cowden. "The fireplaces will be going and there'll be the smell of burning wood and burning leaves. Meanwhile, it'll be getting darker earlier and our lanterns will be lit and people will be in a celebratory mood. It's just magic."
While Thanksgiving is traditionally the Wayside's busiest day, the early part of autumn is already shaping up nicely, he said. With visitors eager to take advantage of the property's walking trails through nearby woods and past features like a water-powered grist mill, Purrington said, he expects the inn's 10 guest rooms to be sold out for most of the season, and dinner and lunch reservations on popular weekdays and on weekends are already "a tough ticket."
"Fall will be very busy," he said.
But another local innkeeper, Celia Hyde, who with her husband, Doug, presides over the Stowaway Inn bed and breakfast in Stow, said she has only hopes, not expectations, that brightly colored leaves will be able to compensate for the bleak state of the US economy.
"In the past, we've gotten a lot of leaf-peepers," she said. "They're generally just people driving around, taking the time to just drink in and appreciate what's around them. But I haven't found that they've been much of my business lately. The gas has been by far the biggest thing - I'm just afraid that people are going to be so concerned about the economy that they're going to economize and stay home."
Fortunately, Hyde said, she gets enough trade from business travelers visiting high-tech companies in neighboring communities to make up for the drop off in "drop ins," as she calls the more spur-of-the-moment guests.
Will a foliage season for the ages convince people that it's worth just wandering around and enjoying the view again, even at $3.34 a gallon?
"I would love it if people would be here to see the foliage," she said. "But honestly, I don't know what's going to happen this year. " 