The minimum leaf number of a connected non-hamiltonian graph G is the number of leaves of a spanning tree of G with the fewest leaves among all spanning trees of G. Based on this quantity, Wiener introduced leaf-stable and leaf-critical graphs, concepts which generalise hypotraceability and hypohamiltonicity. In this article, we present new methods to construct leaf-stable and leaf-critical graphs and study their properties. Furthermore, we improve several bounds related to these families of graphs. These extend previous results of Horton, Thomassen, and Wiener. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.