Framingham Nature Blog - Tree Leaf Identifi...

In the Fall, Trees shed their leaves and I start wondering about which leaves come from which trees. In this post, I am going to show what I found, which you might also be able to use. I will not be including evergreen tree's needles, because that would open up a whole other rabbit hole that I already talked about in January, 2021.

This first photo shows the leaves of the three main oak species in my area. I am starting with these, because oaks by far make up the bulk of deciduous trees in the forests of Eastern United States.

From Left to right: Pin Oak, Northern Red Oak, White Oak

To the left are other Fagus leaves. I also included sassafras because it was nearby when I took the photo. Sassafras is NOT in the family Fagus. Fagus Is made up of Chestnut, Beech, Stone Oaks, and True Oaks.

The top leaf is American Beech, Middle is American Chestnut, Bottom Is Sassafras.

Sassafras smells like fruit loops when you scratch the twigs.

As you can see, the Chestnut leaf looks very similar to the Beech leaf. They are closely related. as a rule of thumb, Beech leaves are about twice as long as they are wide, and chestnut leaves can be up to four times as long as they are wide.

Chestnut leave's sides are more serrated also.

Next I have the "Acer" genus. Acer is the Latin word for sharp, which is for some reason used to classify Maples.

From left to right: Norway Maple, Sugar Maple, Red Maple, Silver Maple.

Norway maples are an invasive species, but the other three are Native. All four maples are commonly planted as roadside trees, and are used in landscaping. Sugar and Red maples turn the beautiful orange and red we associate with maples, while Silver maples and Norway maples tend to go straight to brown.