The branchlet furnishes evidence of the section to which the species belongs, for the bract-bases persist after the bracts have fallen away.
The bracts of spring-shoots are the scarious bud-scales of the previous winter; but the bracts of summer-shoots have the form and green color of the primary leaf.
At this stage the bracts present two important distinctions.
Buds compounded of minute buds in the axils of bud-scales, becoming the bracts of the spring-shoot.
This species is taller and of longer duration than the herbaceous cotton; the lobes of the leaf are narrower, the bracts less divided or entire.
Both thebracts and bractlets enlarge greatly during the development of the ovary, and form, when fully grown, the membranous scales of the strobile (fig.
The ovary and the base of the bracts are covered with a yellowish powder, consisting of minute sessile grains, called lupulin or lupulinic glands.
The bracts can then only be distinguished from the bractlets by being rather more acute and more strongly veined.
The twobracts are, however, on different axes, one secondary to the other, and cannot therefore be parts of one whorl of organs.
Bracts of a more general character subtending branches of the inflorescence are singularly rare in Gramineae, in marked contrast with Cyperaceae, where they are so conspicuous.
Their stalks and bracts are rough with stiff brown or black hairs; and the pappus of the wrinkled fruits consists of a dense mass of white, silky hairs.
The heads of the male plants are globular in form, with spreading purple florets; while those of the female plant are longer and almost cylindrical in form, with longer bracts and shorter florets.
The involucre bracts are also very narrow, bristly at the top; and the fruits are rendered rough by numerous little glandular projections.
The bracts of the involucre are broad, with a green centre and a dark, downy margin.
The flower-heads are terminal, with a white ray and yellow disc, surrounded by blunt bracts the inner of which have membranous tips.
Other Labiates are very similar to this species, but the Clary may be distinguished by its two ovate, cordate bracts at the base of each flower, and by its narrow corolla, which is a little shorter than the calyx.
Each one is enclosed in a tubular whorl of united bracts with small teeth.
There are no bracts at the base of the main pedicels, but five or six bracteoles, with fringed edges, lie at the foot of the secondary pedicels.
The upper leaves are small and narrower, passing gradually into still smaller bracts towards the lower flowers.
The male and female flowers grow on different shrubs; but in both cases the catkins are about half an inch long, with a few leafy bracts at the base, and the flowers are intermixed with silky scales.
Each head is surrounded below by a whorl of lobed bracts about as long as the calyces which become swollen after flowering.
The flower-heads are ovoid, surrounded by an involucre of many closely-overlapping bractswith prickly tips.
The crown of the pine-apple, c, consists of a series of empty bracts prolonged beyond the fruit.
In the juniper the scaly bracts grow up round the seeds and become succulent, and in the fig (fig.
The nut or glans is a dry one-celled indehiscent fruit with a hardened pericarp, often surrounded by bracts at the base, and, when mature, containing only one seed.
When the fruit is composed of the ovaries of several flowers united, it is usual to find the bracts and floral envelopes also joined with them, so as to form one mass; hence such fruits are known as multiple, confluent or anthocarpous.
It is illustrated by the fruits of the hazel and chestnut, which are covered by leafy bracts, in the form of a husk, and by the acorn, in which the bracts and receptacle form a cupula or cup (fig.
The term fruit is strictly applied to the mature pistil or ovary, with the seeds in its interior; but it often includes other parts of the flower, such as the bracts and floral envelopes.
A stove evergreen shrub which produces lovely crimson bracts in the winter.
It bears elegant spikes of white flowers from May onwards, followed by red bracts in September, and is readily propagated by seeds.
Calyx with 2 bracts at the base, top-shaped, monophyllous, 5 lanceolate teeth.
Flowers yellow, in racemes, with caducous bracts and bractlets.
Fruit of the pine-apple (Ananas sativa), consisting of numerous flowers and bracts united together so as to form a collective or anthocarpous fruit.
This clinging quality arises from the bracts of the involucrum being long and stiff, and with hooked tips which attach themselves to every passing object.
Underneath the flowerhead of the Daisy is a green cushion, composed of bracts; in the Hen and Chickens Daisy some of these bracts assume the form of flowers, and are the chickens.
Flowers: male dark indigo-blue, turning violet when nearly ready to open; female with dark violet-purple obovate scales much shorter than their strongly reflexed bracts contracted into slender tips.
Flowers: male pale yellow sometimes tinged with purple; female light yellow-green, with semiorbicular scales and short-oblong bracts emarginate and denticulate at the broad obcordate apex furnished with a short strongly reflexed tip.
In the Lias near Cromarty, Miller states that he found a cone with long bracts like those of Pinus bracteata.
The axis bears in a distichous manner sub-opposite or alternate bracts of a linear-lanceolate form and with decurrent bases.
In the axils of the bracts were developed flower-like leaf-bearing buds, and from them proceeded three or four linear pedicels, which terminated upwards in a somewhat enlarged trumpet-shaped apex.
After fertilization, some of the uppermost bracts below each flower become red and fleshy; the perianth develops into a woody shell, while the integument remains membranous.
The spikes and flowers are those of the lamarckianav, but the bracts are narrower.
Bracts are reduced leaves, but the spikes of the cruciferous plants are generally devoid of them.
Bracts in the inflorescence of crucifers are ordinarily wanting, but may be seen in some genera, Erucastrum pollichii being perhaps the [223] most widely known instance, although other cases might easily be cited.
The ordinary green dahlia [230] has large tufts of green bracts instead of flowering heads, the scales of the receptacle having assumed the texture and venation of leaves, and being in some measure as fleshy.
The scapes themselves are of varying length, often very short, and seldom long, and their umbels display the involucre of bractsin a manner quite analogous to that of the Primula officinalis and P.
In all these cases the bracts behave as with the Erucastrum, [639] being limited to the base of the spike, and decreasing in size from the lower flowers upward.
On one hand, bracts may be met with in a few stray species, assuming the rank of a specific character.
Other instances could be given proving that bracts and stipules, when systematically lacking, are liable to reappear as anomalies.
Bracts and analogous organs afford similar cases of systematic atavism in quite a number of other families.
A second example is afforded by the bracts of the crucifers.
The flowering spikes of the second year bear long leaf-like bracts under the first few flowers, but those arising later are much shorter.
Connected with these atavistic bracts is a feature of minor importance, which however, by its almost universal accompaniment of the bracts, deserves our attention, as it is indicative of another latent character.
In the dandelion the bracts of the involucre give the best characters.
The systematic importance of this phenomenon, however, is far greater than in the first case, in which we had only to deal with a specific character, while the abolition of the bracts has become a feature of a whole family.
Poppies have been recorded to bear bracts analogous to the little scales on the flower-stalks of the pansies, on the middle of their flower stalks.
An increase in the number of bracts has been met with very constantly in a species of Mæsa, and in a peculiar variety of carnation, called the wheat-ear carnation.
Scape with two leaves; the bracts of the involucre are also leafy.
In Umbelliferæ the substitution of leaves for involucralbracts is not infrequent.
The stamens of the lower division were serially continuous with the bracts above.
Delphinium Consolida, in which the bracts were greatly increased in number, petaloid, and, at the same time, the central organs of the flower were wholly wanting.
So also the bracts or leaves below the perianth in Anemone coronaria and hortensis not unfrequently assume the coloration usually confined to the parts of the perianth.
The bracts of some species of Plantago[246] are very subject to this change.
As bracts are very generally imperfect organs, so their replacement by perfect leaves is not attributable to arrest of development or retrograde metamorphosis, but the reverse.
Both terms are open to the objection that they do not clearly enable us to distinguish prolification occurring within the flower from a similar state originating outside the flower, within the bracts of the inflorescence.
Godron considers that the compression of the lateral bracts is the cause of the irregularity of the androecium and of the receptacle.
Multiplication of bractsat the expense of the other parts of the flower.
The empty or unloaded bracts tumble and slide through the air endwise, with nothing to balance them or steady their descent, while the fruit on other bracts holds them with one side to the air, which prolongs their descent.
Oraches are most readily distinguished among the Chenopods by the two bracts which enclose the fruit and enlarge after flowering; and, like the Purslanes, they have unisexual flowers, both male and female being on the same plant.
The bracts are long and leafy, with short sheaths surrounding the stem.
Its leaves are oval and narrow, obtuse, and of a glaucous colour, and the bracts are more triangular than those of the last species.
The leaves are linear, acute, and fleshy, and the bracts are linear and imbricated.
When the weevil punctures a square, it turns yellow and the bracts flare open.
As soon as the squares form, the weevil gets on the inside of the bracts and feeds only by inserting its beak deep into the squares.
Gorgeous, glowing scarlet heads of bee balm arrest the dullest eye, bracts and upper leaves often taking on blood-red color, too, as if it had dripped from the lacerated flowers.
It is like a small edition of the hedge bind weed, only its calyx lacks the leaf-like bracts at its base, its slender stem rarely exceeds two feet in length, and the little pink and white flowers often grow in pairs.
Several series of pink overlapping bracts form the oblong involucre from which the tubular floret and its protruding fringe of style-branches arise.
Calyx of 5 sepals, concealed by 2 large bracts at base.
Answer: The calyx is a foliaceous transformation, intermediary between the bracts and the corolla.
In other flowers this morphogenic wavering inclines towards the bracts rather than towards the corolla.
For example: in the Berberis vulgaris, the young calicinal leaflets have less resemblance to the bracts than to the petals of the corolla, and hence they have received the name of petaloid sepals.
The flowering stems are gathered in June, when the bracts are fully developed, all the fully-expanded and immature flowers being pulled off and rejected.
These are the styles and stigmas, and on dissection of the budlike head, each pair of styles will be seen to spring from a two-celled ovary nestling between the bracts or scales of which the head is composed.
The bracts of the male are oval, with sharp tips, each containing an uncertain (3-12) number of stamens.
The shell is the ovary that has become woody and hard; the ragged-edged leathery "shuck" is the enlargedbracts that surrounded the minute flower.
The female spikes have the fleshy scales covered by red-brown bractsof a woody consistence, which persist after the fruit has dropped out of them.
In the female the bracts fall early, but their place is taken by three-lobed bracteoles, which enlarge after flowering, and become an inch or an inch and a half long.
Those that chance to be left by the industrious harvesters drop the scales and bracts when fully ripe, and it is fine to see the purple-winged seeds flying in swirling, merry-looking flocks seeking their fortunes.
Bracts forming a fleshy or hard cupule which envelops the one to several fruits.
The generally one-seeded nut-like fruit is associated with the persistent often hardened or greatly enlarged bracts forming the so-called cupule which gives the name to the group.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "bracts" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
