Learn About the Greenness of Plants

You may have learned that leaves are green because they're full of a green molecule called chlorophyll. It's the reason for the greenness of plants from moss-green moss to grass-green grass to evergreen evergreens. And the reason chlorophyll is so incredibly popular, showing up in nearly every plant on Earth, is that it's good at soaking up sunlight. The more light a plant gets, the more energy it has to make sugar and grow tulips and kumquats and do all the other things plants do.

But wait a second, doesn't the fact that chlorophyll is green mean that it's actually bad at absorbing green light? I mean, sunlight is composed of the whole rainbow of colors, each a separate wavelength. And the colors we see when we look at a leaf are the wavelengths that leaf isn't absorbing. That is, they're the ones that bounce off the leaf and reach our eyes.

Chlorophyll is great at absorbing reds and blues, but if it were really awesome, wouldn't it absorb all colors of light, green included, giving us a world full of black moss and black grass and everblack trees? So why aren't leaves black? And since they apparently don't have to be black, what's stopping them from being red or blue instead? Is green just nature's favorite color, or is there something special about those wavelengths of light?

The short answer is that we don't know for sure. Some scientists speculate it's serendipity that plants today are green. Long ago, Earth's oceans were filled with purple single-celled organisms called archaea. Being purple, they absorbed green light and let red and blue pass through.

The theory is that this minus green light was the only source of solar energy in the deep water below, so bacteria living there got really good at absorbing everything else but green. And the molecule that did the light absorbing-- chlorophyll, maybe. What we do know is that chlorophyll, as wasteful as its failure to absorb green light may be, turned out to have other biochemical advantages over the purple competition. And perhaps as a result of this ancient biological rivalry, the plant world today is green and not purple or red or blue.

Of course, you might still wonder why plants didn't develop black leaves once they emerged from the depths. I mean, they changed a lot of other things going from bacteria to mighty Redwood. Well, maybe it's simply that nature isn't about perfection, and life doesn't need flawless black to get by-- just good enough green. Or maybe plants were even more clever and turned the weakness of chlorophyll into a strength. But we'll have to leave that story for later.