A mystery of plants

So, when I was reading Francis Hallé's In Praise of Plants there was this confusing bit about how, like, each bud is almost creating a new being, there can be genomic differences.

I was looking at my jasmine and the leaf shape is like the one on the front page. oh, I'll put it here for comparison.

Three pairs and one at the end. And they come at opposite sides of the stalk. The tiniest fronds are like that.

Then, very, very occasionally, you see something like this.

See how the final leaf can't decide if it wants to be another pair?

But there is ONE pair like this.

How strange is that??

Looking again, I saw there were two pairs of stalks with leaves like this - the first pairs coming off two stems that shot off the main stem - so that the main stem, instead of producing a pair of normal leaf stems (with the three pairs and one leaf at the end), produced a pair of stems. At the base of each stem there are some stunted leaves and the first pair of leaf stems has these abnormal ones (one pair and a leaf at the end).

Now, some plants change a great deal - like holly with prickly leaves until it's tall enough and then they become smooth. But that is consistent. Ivies have a different structure as a juvenile and adult plant, Hallé says. He is talking about how they grow, the branches. Still, the leaves vary too. I saw two very different leaves on the same ivy plant.

You can get very large leaves on low epicormic stems of poplars, I've seen that. And I have found some absurdly large oak leaves from an English oak. I wonder if that is about shade? The size of beech leaves seems to vary tree by tree - and oak by oak as well... I remember looking at a row of oaks at Cottesbrooke. Their acorns vary considerably too. Some trees produce large oval ones, others are smaller and more rounded. That's not surprising, but the jasmine really is.

On leaves: something is eating the baby poplars.

Some spider mite, maybe?