The surface of a leaf is where sunlight does its magic. The underside is where the rest of the action takes place, i.e., that what makes life possible. We all know what the surface of a leaf looks like, but what about the underside when examined up-close? Our journey this week begins with this question.

Now we’ve all seen magnified pictures of leaves before: a patterned surface crisscrossed by veins, looking much like great canals connected to smaller and smaller tributaries. But what I didn’t expect was the wide diversity in which this single simple concept was expressed. In this album, there are 15 pictures of 15 different types of leaves, all randomly selected from my garden. They look similar, yet they also look different.

As you will see, nature has found many different ways to do what is essentially the same thing. And that, in a nutshell, is also the story of our lives. In the final analysis we all believe and want the same things, there are just many different roads that can possibly get us there. Enjoy. Bobby

(As a bonus, due to the magnification at which each image was taken, the leaves look like grand landscapes. The surreal views look much like real-life countrysides, with each vein looking like a river, and each natural undulation appearing to be either a mountain or a valley. To the critters that live at this scale, this is as much a world to them as ours is to us. And to put the photos in perspective, I've inserted a small purple square on the left-hand side of each frame. The square is one millimeter long on each side, making the square about the size of a grain of sand. I hope it will give you a sense of scale, and of awe, of the tiny worlds that exist just beyond ours.)