wrote:
Let me describe the problem first, so you can appreciate why I am
looking for a better way of telling apart
Rock Elm from other elm. A few years back I was lucky to find some
Rock Elm seeds, only that I was
not expert enough to definitely know whether the seeds were really
Rock Elm and not American elm or
Siberian elm. And in the seedling flat, some of the seeds got mixed up
where some American elm
were mixed with the few Rock Elm seeds. So then my problem became,
after the seedlings sprouted
and began growing into tree saplings is whether the sapling is truly a
Rock Elm or whether a American
Elm or Siberian Elm.

Well, after a sapling grows to a height, if it is Siberian is pretty
easy to tell since the leaves are
so much smaller than either Rock Elm or American Elm. The trouble is
distinguishing between
Rock Elm and American Elm.

So I think I have found a new way of distinguishing that maybe
superior to all the other ways.
It is the thickness of the leaf. Rock Elm leaves are at least 2X
thicker than the same size of
leaf of a American Elm. Rock Elm leaves feel like cardboard compared
to American Elm as the
thickness of paper.

So I think this test-- compare the leaf thickness is perhaps the
single best test.


Now I am going to try a density weight test in the next several days.
Where I get
a Rock Elm leaf that is the same size as a American Elm leaf and weigh
the two.

What I hope to find is a sure fire way of telling the two species
apart.

I believe the weight density of Rock Elm is about 2X greater than
American Elm.

So that if in the future, I bump into a elm tree. And by simply
feeling the leaf, would
be able to say which of those elm it is.

Now going further, to generalize, I wonder if I hit on a key test to
differentiate two species
that are close together.

I have a tough time of telling the ashes apart, whether green-ash or
white-ash. So I wonder
if the density weight of leaves is a sure fire way.

My scale may not go down far enough for a leaf, so I may have to use a
relative weight scale of
balancing beam with one leaf on one end and the other the other end.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies