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Here's a leaf from the "Red Oak." The heartwood is indeed red and can be polished to a beautiful finish. However, be ready to do lots and lots of sanding. All of the oaks produce very hard, tough wood. Red oak is the easiest to split, making it popular in a great many applications where one needs to split the wood rather than sawing it, but less than popular where splitting is likely to be a problem.
Variations in leaf size are not that unusual, even on a single tree, but the red oak carries this to something of an extrema as you can see from this battered old veteran of this summer's battles with weather, insects and fungii.
Here's a leaf from a different kind of "wait-a-minute" vine. This one is odd because the shiny side is down! I don't know what it is with wait-a-minute vines, but they're definitely different.
It's funny, but Welles had to do tons of work before he could start scanning. Me, I can do five minutes of gathering specimens, then I have hours of scanning to do. Chalk it up to my $80.00 scanner's speed, but I really do have to be careful how many leaves I collect before I start scanning. If I collect too many, several of them will be too wilted to be useful.
These are opposite sides of a leaf from the persimmon tree. The fruit is a curious thing and I've never seen them sold at a grocer. The native variety has a nice flavor, but you can't eat it until after it has been hit by a frost. Why? Because it will turn your mouth wrong side out--as though it were laced with alum. For all I know, it is lace with alum. Wait until after a freeze! They're fine then. Oddly enough, they are pickled in the orient. Can you imagine? Pickled plums and persimmons? Whoa! My head nearly collapses everytime I think about it.
Scanned Leaves 03 
Linear Mode
