Terminal Bud - Harry Lauder Walkingstick Tree - December 2021 - Winter Tree Bud Series

The photo in this post is featuring the leaf bud of a small Harry Lauder contorted Walking Stick tree that we bought back in 2020 and was DIRECTLY inspired by our trip to Disneyland Paris and the landscaping around their Haunted Mansion called Phantom Manor.  I planted it in the backyard in the Summer of 2020 and have had it wired up with some bamboo poles ever since.  Early this Spring, I moved around the poles and wires because the growth was causing a little damage due to the pole locations.  

Most every Winter, I try to include some updates and photos of the various leaf buds from some of the trees that I've planted, but in looking back through the [buds] archives, I don't seem to have included this particular tree and bud in the catalog.  The most recent buds that I posted a photo of were the damaged Ginko tree from this Fall.  

Here, below, is a look at a couple of the Harry Lauder Walkingstick tree buds:

Buds of our trees that get set in Fall and persist over Winter are pretty fascinating to me and are one of the things that I'm going to try to get smart on (or as Roy Diblik says..."get to know") over Winter.  

I recently found this four-page Winter tree bud guide and glossary from the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point that is where I'm starting.  The guide opens with this glossary of terms (below) and then walks users through how to use Winter-time features to help identify the trees when they've dropped all of their leaves. 

Armed with this document, I suppose I should be using the proper term for the photo at the top:  That's a terminal bud.  And, further down the branch is a lateral bud. I've updated the title of this post to use Terminal.

Last year, I posted about the shape of the London Planetree buds on the blog and (at the time, I included this quote about tree buds from nature writer (and Madman) Rutherford Platt that posited that tree buds are:

“varied as jewelry, in all sorts of exquisite shapes and bright colors.”

Well... That's kind of interesting to read, isn't it? Not that Rutherford Platt was a 'madman'.  But, that he was so fascinated by buds of trees that he shared that quote.   I guess I've never thought about buds being so varied before, but they sure are, aren't they? Makes me realize that I *do* need to do a proper series of 'Winter Tree Buds" posts as we head into Winter. I've covered and shared photos of buds before (like this one of our Saucer Magnolia tree or these Frans Fontaine Columnar Hornbeam Buds from 2019), but organizing the trees we have by buds feels like a blog-worthy project.