October '20

A tall deciduous tree can boast up to a 100,000 leaves. Now consider there are about 3 trillion trees on the entire planet, at least according to Dr. Crowther, botanist from Yale University in the USA. For full disclosure, he has not yet answered our question about whether he actually carried out academic due diligence and counted every single tree himself.

Half of those trees are found in tropical and subtropical climates; we will thus exclude them. We must also rule out the stubbornly lively evergreens. In the Czech Republic, for instance, evergreens hold a 2/3 majority in arboreal representation, while the deciduous half shyly hides a plentitude of bushes, meaning the true number is thus perhaps lower by yet another half. We are now at about 750 billion deciduous trees (and shrubs). Let’s assign each of them a highly conservative 10,000 leaves per piece. Elementary-school arithmetics will then get us to about 7.5 quadrillion leaves, i.e. about a million leaves for every earthling.

Surely you will not bicker with us about one or two leaves, give or take. You could, though, counter that in October, the southern hemisphere enjoys spring hues. However, the antipodes only have a third of the Earth’s land, most of which is found in the already excluded tropical and subtropical regions. For peace of mind, feel free to subtract a couple hundred trillion. We believe that this way, we will arrive at the same conclusion: the reasons to enjoy a beautiful autumn are more than plentiful.