Moore: The study of winter buds 121 



the xylol, they were stained horizontally two or three minutes and 

 washed in absolute alcohol. They were then cleared and mounted 

 in the usual manner. 



Gross study of buds 



Leaf content : The observation that winter buds contain leaves 

 IS doubtless older than the science of botany. The final proposi- 

 tion to prove is, how many of the leaves which develop during the 

 spring and summer actually exist in the bud at the beginning of 

 winter. In a consideration of this question the number of leaves 

 found in the terminal or upper axillary bud has been counted and 

 compared with the number of nodes which developed in the same 

 twig during the two or three preceding seasons* Such an enumer- 

 ation, combined with a microscopical study of sections of buds 

 fixed each month from November to May, 1905-6, and with field 

 obsei"vations at tbe time of the unfolding of the leaves in the spring 

 cannot fail to give results which must be regarded as conclusive. 



Bailey (1898) says ; '' There are as many leaves packed away 

 in the bud, as a rule, as there will be leaves on next year's shoot/' 

 He gives no citations of literature and presents no investigations 

 on which to base this generalization. We are left in doubt 

 whether an individual plant or different species of plants may show 

 variation in this respect. All effort to find any published record 

 more definite than this has been futile. 



The whorls of leaves in the bud of Acer platanoides agree, as 

 to number, with the number of nodes on the same twigs one, two, 

 or three seasons back with the exception that, in some cases, the 



number of whorls is one more or one less than the number of 

 nodes. Observations on a large number of primary branches 

 together with the dissection of terminal buds show this variation in 

 the number of nodes dev^eloped during different seasons. In fact, 

 this tendency to variation is true of all trees and shrubs and is 

 particularly noticeable in secondary branches. This discrepancy 

 is easily explained by the fact that, practically under the same 

 conditions, the number of nodes produced each season may vary 

 slightly. Since the counts so nearly agree, it is, therefore, fair to 

 assume that buds with four whorls of leaves will produce four 

 nodes ; those with three whorls will produce three nodes and so 

 on. The number of nodes on the branches of each s^d^son is four 



