ADVENTITIOUS BUDS

Field, Forest and Farm by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. ADVENTITIOUS BUDS

CHAPTER XVII. ADVENTITIOUS BUDS

“Buds such as we have been considering appear in the spring and then spend the summer in gaining strength, after which they remain stationary and as if wrapped in deep sleep all through the winter. The following spring they wake up and grow into branches or blossom into flowers. It is plainly to be seen that these dormant buds, as arboriculture calls them in its picturesque language, must, in order to withstand the summer heat and the winter’s cold, be clothed so as not to be parched by the sun or killed by the frost. They are all in fact covered with a wrapping of scales, and for that reason are called scaly buds. Buds of this class are found in the lilac, chestnut, pear, apple, cherry, poplar, and in fact nearly all the trees of our country.

But if a tree can wait and devote a whole year to the development of its buds, which are clothed in a sheath of scales because of this waiting, there are a multitude of plants that have only a limited time at their disposal: they live only a year, and hence are called annuals. Such are the potato, carrot, pumpkin, and a great many more. In a few months or days they must hastily develop their buds. These, not having to pass through the winter, are [85]never enveloped in protecting scales: they are naked buds. As soon as they appear they elongate, unfold their leaves, and become branches taking part in the work of the whole. Very soon, in the axils of their leaves, other buds make their appearance and behave like their predecessors; that is to say, they develop quickly into branches which in their turn produce other buds. And so on indefinitely until winter puts a stop to this scaffold of branches and kills the whole plant. Thus annuals ramify rapidly. In one year they produce several generations of branches implanted one on another, sometimes more, sometimes fewer, according to their species and their degree of vigor. Their buds, designed for immediate development, are always naked. On the contrary, those forms of vegetation that have a long life, such as trees, ramify slowly; they have only one generation of branches a year, and their buds, destined to live through the winter, are scaly.

Certain examples of plant-life have both kinds of buds. Such, for instance, are the peach-tree and the grape-vine. At the end of winter the vine-shoot bears scaly buds lined with flock, and the peach branches scaly buds coated with varnish. Both belong to the class of dormant buds: they have slept all winter in their sheaths of fur and scales. In the spring they develop into branches according to the general rule; but at the same time there appear in the axils of the leaves other buds without any protecting covering, and these develop immediately into branches. Thus the grape-vine and the peach-tree [86]beget two generations in one year: the first, the issue of the scaly buds that have endured the winter; the second, naked buds formed in the spring and developing very soon after their formation. The branches arising from these latter finally give birth to scaly buds, which sleep through the winter and reproduce the same order of things the following year.

“Both axillary and terminal buds are in the normal order of plant-life: they appear in all forms of vegetation that live several years. But when the plant is in danger, when by some accident the regular buds are lacking or insufficient, others spring into being here and there at haphazard, even on the root if necessary, to restore a languishing vitality and put the plant once more in a flourishing condition. These accidental buds are to the part of the plant above the ground what adventitious roots are to the part below the ground: the menace of the moment calls them into existence at any endangered point. The edges of the wound caused by the lopping off of a branch, the part of a tree-trunk constricted by a band, portions of the bark injured by contusion, these are the points where they appear by preference. They are called adventitious buds, but their structure does not differ from that of normal buds.

“Adventitious buds lend themselves to valuable uses. Suppose a number of young saplings to be planted at proper intervals in the ground. If they are then left to themselves these saplings grow each into a single trunk and form collectively a wood or forest. But it may be of advantage to replace each [87]of these single trunks by a group of several trunks. In that case the young plantation is cut down to the level of the ground, and around the edge of each cross-section there presently spring a number of adventitious buds which shoot up into an equal number of stems, so that each sapling that would have developed only one trunk is transformed into a stump from which start numerous sprouts or suckers, all of the same age and strength. Then instead of a wood or forest we have a growth of underbrush, or a copse. When the suckers have acquired the desired size, a fresh cutting back lays them low and induces a still denser growth of shoots by multiplying the number of wounds. It is thus that from a single stock, repeatedly cut back and as often reinvigorated by the growth of adventitious buds, a quantity of wood is obtained exceeding that produced by the free and solitary development of one tree.

“Spared by the axe, the poplar rises in a majestic obelisk of verdure. The willow, so ungraceful in appearance along the banks of our ditches, with its shapeless top bristling with shoots sticking out in all directions, is, in its natural state, a tree of rare elegance on account of the suppleness of its branches and the fineness of its foliage. Considered as a thing of beauty, it certainly has nothing to gain by man’s interference with its mode of growth. But, alas, productivity does not always go hand in hand with beauty; and if it is desired to make these two trees, the poplar and the willow, produce a great [88]mass of branches and fire-wood, decapitation, repeated periodically, transforms them into pollards, seamed with scars, gaping with bleeding wounds, disfigured with bruises, but at the same time contending against all this hard usage by a never-failing growth of adventitious buds which constantly replace with increasing prodigality the brushwood that has fallen victim to the axe.

“To finish the subject of adventitious buds—buds that persist in multiplying even when the parent stock languishes, and that withstand destruction until utter exhaustion has set in—let us recall for a moment certain weeds such as dog’s-tooth grass, cock-spur grass, and other grasses that are so hard to keep out of our garden paths unless we do something more than merely rake the surface of the ground. You may have taken infinite pains, we will say, to clean the paths, and have left them immaculate, or at least you think so. But you are mistaken. In a few days the grass has all come back in richer tufts than ever. The reason is plain enough now: your raking simply cut back the stems, leaving wounds that immediately covered themselves with adventitious buds, which quickly sent up new stalks. Thus, instead of destroying, you have multiplied. The only way to clear the ground of weeds is to pull them up by the roots; that done, you may consider the job well done.”

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