The importance of being red

Hooray for anthocyanin. Where would we be without it? It has long been my favourite water-soluble, vacuolar, glucosidic pigment, and I feel that this autumn has justified my preference. True, chlorophyll is more important until then, being essential for photosynthesis, so we should all be in dead trouble without it; and the carotenoids, carotene and xanthophyll, are often more obvious to us, because of the delicious golden yellow to which many native shrubs — field maple, elm suckers, and blackthorn — turn in autumn.