I was looking for things to examine along a path in a wooded area on campus that runs between the chemistry building and a road. I thought it would be neat to look at two very different looking leaves, and while most had already fallen from the trees and dried up, I was able to find a small yellow leaf on a bush, and a tiny green sprout on the ground. This is the top side of the yellow leaf:

and this is the bottom side of the yellow leaf:

I thought it was really interesting to see how both sides looked up-close, and was actually kind of surprised how similar they seemed. To the naked eye, the bottom side of the leaf looked a lot whiter, but maybe as I held the sample up to the light to get a photo, the yellow came through. Here is the stem and part of a leaf of the other tiny plant:

I thought it was really cool to see the structure of the cells making up the stem and how different it looked from the leaf. The cell structure of the piece of leaf in this image, as well as in the previous two, is less obvious compared to the stem. I would assume that this is because the stem moves water from the soil into the leaves, making the cells appear and more translucent. I with I had taken a piece of stem from the yellow-leafed plant to examine and compare as well. I conducted this project as part of Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University.