The spread of wildland fires is significantly influenced by the burning behavior of finer fuels, e.g., shrubs, leaves, and grasses, as they burn much more rapidly. Most of these finer fuels that burn are from living vegetation. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the combustion behavior of living leaves from different species to develop better modeling and control strategies for wildfires. The present study investigates burning behavior of salal leaves, a shrub species found in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. The focus is on understanding the physics underlying the burning behavior observed at different heat fluxes and moisture contents for the live and dried fuel samples. The experiments were performed by burning individual leaves in a convective environment of exhaust gases from a flat-flame burner operated with a stoichiometric mixture of air and methane gas. A high-speed monochromatic video camera was used to observe the time scales of different burning stages. The surface temperature of the fuel sample was also measured during the burning. The "microexplosions" associated with droplet ejection and burning stage before flaming combustion were observed for all the leaves, irrespective of their moisture content. The time for onset of droplet ejection and ignition were reduced at higher heat flux and lower moisture content values. The variations in ignition time increased significantly for live fuel, especially at lower convective heat flux. A significant change was observed in the onset point of droplet ejection as moisture content approached 50% and in the duration of droplet ejection and time to ignite as moisture content increased to greater than 100%. This signifies that there exists a critical value of moisture content for different combustion parameters where the effect of moisture content starts dominating.