Welcome to the Wonders of Dendrology

"Dendrology is often confused with botany. However, botany is the study of all types of general plants and dendrology should be considered more as a subcategory of botany specifying in wooded plants" Thanks wikipedia for explaining my wikimedia.

As I was walking back to our apartment from the gym I looked down and picked a leaf up from the path. I occurred to me that of all the trees around me, I couldn't tell you the name of one of them.

I took the leaf home and jumped on the internet to find out from which type of tree it fell. This is the information age after all.

This is my leaf


I simply typed "leaf identifier" into the yahoo search bar and clicked on this link:http://forestry.about.com/od/treeidentification/tp/tree_key_id_start.htm

Basically, you take your leaf and follow the prompts. It was as easy as that. I found out that my leaf fell from an American sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua). These trees have a fruit shaped like a spikey ball. The leaves look like stars,have 5-7 points, and change beautiful shades of red in the fall.


Thanks to bamboosage on flickr for this great gum ball pic.

With your new sweet gum identification skills, you have no reason not to impress your friends the next time you're out in nature. Just let 'em know how great those sweet gums look this time of year.