Matching Game: Tree Leaves
Flip two cards at a time and match each leaf to its tree. Every card says whether it is a Leaf or a Tree, and a pair is always one of each. The game counts a mistake when you miss a match on a card you have already seen.
How to tell them apart
Start with the needles. A pine holds its long needles in bundles, and on many pines a papery sheath wraps the base of each bundle. A spruce has needles one by one, each on a tiny woody peg that stays on the twig after the needle falls. A fir has flat needles one by one, often spread in two flat rows. A larch grows its soft needles in tufts on short spurs.
Two oaks look alike until you look at the tips. White oak has rounded lobes, and red oak has pointed lobes that each end in a fine bristle.
Some leaves are split into leaflets. Ash has a few leaflets in pairs with one at the tip, black walnut has many narrow leaflets and often none at the tip, and horse chestnut spreads its leaflets from one point like the fingers of a hand.
How to remember the trees
Link something you see in the drawing to the sound of the name with a mental image. For holly, you might picture a holy man who sits down on a spiny leaf and jumps straight back up. The stranger the picture, the easier it is to recall. See how to create mnemonic images for more ways to build them.
To remember where each card is, give every position on the board a place in a memory palace, and walk back through the palace when you need to find a partner.
About the drawings
The leaves are drawn for this site. Leaves vary from tree to tree and even on one branch, so each card shows a typical leaf. Where a whole group of trees shares the tell, such as the needles of the pines, the card names the group. Most leaves are drawn in their summer green, but the sugar maple is in its autumn orange and the ginkgo in its autumn gold, since that is how most people know them.
The deck mixes trees of North America, such as sugar maple and sassafras, with trees of Europe, such as horse chestnut and sweet chestnut.
Try a bigger board
Every game deals a different set of trees, so play again to meet new ones. Once you can clear a small board with only a few mistakes, move up a size.
Try another matching game or see all of our free memory games.
