Help: humongous leaves!

[klier at iscsvax.uni.edu]

>> In article <16390 at umd5.umd.edu> bwilliam at oyster.smcm.edu (Bill Williams) writes:
>>>A twelve-year-old kid in our neighborhood (southern Maryland, USA)
>>>recently found an oak leaf
>>>(Quercus velutina, I think) about four times larger than any I've
>>>previously seen -- it's about 35 cm long by 30 cm broad. He and some

H2, if you don't like H1 ("watersprouts")  
  I caught the tail end of an interview with a British botanist who
  had visited the Ukraine a couple of years post-Chernobyl.  He remarked
  on the number of mutant plants, and particularly on some of the oak
  trees with "leaves 18 inches long".

As an aside to trees and nuclear radiation mutations, I could point out
that the only alternate-leaved ash (Fraxinus) I've ever seen is in
Reactor Woods, a woodland surrounding a WW-2 era experimental reactor
in Ames, Ia.  Looks like normal green ash, but alternate leaves????
And it's on a sight line from one of the old reactor beams....

Kay Klier  Biology Dept  UNI