Did you know that you can listen to many of your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?

Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked.

Good things come to those who don't wait.

Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.

The Scotland Outdoors podcast with Mark Stephen and Ewan McElwraith from BBC Radio Scotland.

Music Hello and thanks very much for choosing to listen to this.

I'm Mark Stephen.

When we recorded the interviews for this edition of the podcast, Storm Arwen was just beginning to hit Aberdeenshire where Ewan and I both live. In fact,

to be honest, we were lucky to get the thing done at all. As both of us had power cuts just as

the interview was drawing to a close. At one stage, Ewan had to disappear completely because his

garage roof had been ripped off by the winds. Now, it may seem slightly odd to be talking

about leaves in the middle of winter when there are, frankly, none of the winds. Now, it may seem slightly odd to be talking about leaves in the middle of

winter when there are frankly none on the trees, and especially on a day when any vestiges of autumn

were well and truly blown away. Most of it ended up in Norway. But it might just serve to remind us

generally how fascinating and important leaves and trees are to us and to the planet as a whole.

Our guests, the co-authors of a book called The Lives of Leaves, a Douglas Justice and Dan Crowley.

Now, Douglas joined us from Vancouver, where he works at the University of British Columbia's Botanic Garden.

A part of the world has seen its fair share of extreme weather in recent months with pretty devastating

consequences. Well, we're in Vancouver, and Vancouver has kind of dodged a bit of that bullet,

but we have what are known as atmospheric rivers that are actually fairly common at this time of the year,

but we had a particularly serious one a couple of weeks

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