What is a Deciduous Tree

g'day welcome to i cultivate my name's steve today we're going to be looking at a question that i get quite often and that is what is a deciduous tree some plants are evergreen and this means that they keep their leaves all year round some really good examples of that are these three different varieties of camellia and then we have these other types of plants that do lose their leaves during different times of the year the question is why with evergreen plants they usually will live in a climate that subjects them to minimal stress they usually will have enough light for their needs enough water the temperature is okay and so on so they don't have to respond to extreme conditions in any way shape or form but with deciduous trees they will lose their leaves in order to protect themselves from the harsh conditions that they might be subjected to in the area within which they occur naturally so with this leaf fall that we're seeing happening on this particular tree right now there's really two things that have occurred the first is a color change to the leaves and then that's been followed by the leaves actually falling so the reason for the colour change well most plants of course we think of as being green now the reason for the green color is due to the presence of a pigment called chlorophyll and chlorophyll is necessary for the process of photosynthesis well clearly when we look at this particular tree here it's lost a lot of its green and the reason for that is because it has lost a lot of the chlorophyll pigment or not actually lost but actually moved from the leaves into storage and other forms in the plant in order to be conserved during those colder months of the year now that explains why they are no longer green but why are they yellow and red and sometimes just plain old brown well the reason for that is because not only is the plant removing the chlorophyll from the leaves to conserve for future use but it's also pumping into the leaves a whole range of toxins and various other materials that it can't normally eliminate naturally so what happens is the plant will pump those toxins into the leaves and then when the leaves fall so do the toxins and they've been then removed from the plant on the ground here we have a whole heap of leaf material that the plant didn't want and as gardeners we can use please don't take this material bag it up and then send it to the tip it's got a lot of wonderful uses in our garden it makes wonderful mulch and also wonderful compost so keep it on your land and recycle it within your garden don't get rid of it now i hope you've enjoyed this video and found it interesting can i ask you please to go down to the thumbs up and give us a thumbs up subscribe to this channel and go to our website icultivate.net and become a member of the community thanks for watching [Music]