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Old 14-03-2003, 02:08 AM
Zeuspaul
 
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Default Same plants, different leaves

There are some species that have different leaf shapes as they progress from
juvenille to adult phases but tomatoes aren't one of them, dude.


And there are trees with different leaves on the same tree at the same time such
as the sassafras tree.

http://www.publicbookshelf.com/publi...ssafras_e.html

THE WAYWARD WAY OF THE SASSAFRAS LEAVES

Yes, and leaves right on the same tree sometimes differ so that you'd declare
they came from different kinds of trees. From three different kinds of trees,
even!

Take the leaves of the Sassafras, for example. You'll find on the very same
tree -- on the very same twig, often -- a three-lobed leaf, several oval leaves,
and a leaf popularly known as the "mitten" because it's shaped, for all the
world, like one of those big, clumsy, comfortable mittens that you'll be wearing
pretty soon when you bring in wood for the kitchen stove on a cold winter's day.

This playful habit of the Sassafras seems to be rather characteristic of the
youth of the tree, for the mature trees' leaves are more nearly all of one
pattern -- the lobed.

To be sure, you could never find two leaves exactly alike; not even if you had
before you, to select from, all the untold millions and billions and trillions
of leaves from the days of the Garden of Eden up to the present. Yet the leaves
differ more on some kinds of trees than others. The Sassafras and the Mulberry
take the prize in this respect, I suppose, but there are others almost as
inventive. Take the Burr-Oak, for instance. The outlines of its leaves wander
around in all sorts of eccentric ways; but always somewhere -- usually about the

middle -- are two deep indentations, as if some of the invisible little leaf
tailors that work in the woods had tried to see how near they could come to
cutting it in two without actually doing it; for these deep cuts are on opposite
sides of the leaf and reach nearly to the midrib!