Tiny Felt Leaves

One spring I was fascinated by these tiny, just-emerged oak leaves I found on the many oak saplings along the edge of the woods. To me they looked like tiny felt crafts. They were actually tiny enough to be tricky to photograph.

Bright red, fuzzy leaves don’t seem to be a characteristic of any specific oak species; they could have to do with environmental conditions, but I wasn’t able to find much information about it. Plus, I don’t know if what I found was talking about leaves that were as tiny as the ones I found. They certainly grew out of their fuzzy red stage extremely quickly.

These leaves are only a couple days older than the others and still quite fuzzy but they only have a hint of the red at the edges of the leaves.

The undersides of a couple leaves just emerging from the bud.
A detail crop of one of the leaves.
A wider view of the emerging leaves.

I was able to spot bright red leaves like this again this past spring so I do know it wasn’t just a one-year oddity. I’m pretty sure at least some of these are burr oak, but it’s hard to tell for sure what they all were at this stage and there may have been multiple species with leaves like this. (I’m pretty sure these are all from the white oak group, though.) I’m still not quite sure yet how common this might be, but I could see it being easy to overlook, as tiny as the leaves are and if they’re on mature trees they’d be up well out of sight.

2 thoughts on “Tiny Felt Leaves”

  1. Absolutely incredible photos, Brennah. I wonder if the leaves on our live oaks emerge this way. I’ll have to see if I can tell.

Comments are closed.