I conducted this project as part of Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University.

Just one lone Indian Croton leaf on the ground in my friend's dorm room. Red on one side, green on the other. It's a pretty leaf, probably why my friend has the plant on his windowsill. But, other than that, it doesn't seem like there's much to it. Or is there...

I took the leaf off the ground and decided to bring it to my ecology class. Today, we were building Foldscopes, and so I figured that this could be an interesting organism to look at through this origami microscope. I ripped a small piece off and placed it on one of my slides. When I put my camera in front of the lens and lifted it towards the light on my classroom ceiling, I was exposed to a red circle with green spots all over. Moving the slide around, I also found some streaks of green among those spots. These images weren't originally visible when I was looking at the leaf earlier in my friend's dorm room. But when using the Foldscope, I could see that there's so much more to this leaf once you zoom in and take a closer look. It's really not as simple as it may seem.