"Bract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to them now please the man. The noble American linden, one of the really great trees of our forests, bears these delicate whitish flowers, held in rich clusters from a single stem which is attached for part of its length to a curious long green bract. If these flowers came naked on the tree, as do those of the Norway maple, for instance, they would be easily seen and admired of men, but being withheld until the splendid heart-shaped foliage is well out, the blooms miss the casual eye. But the bees see them; they know the linden ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... gardens than either of the following varieties. The stems are square and tender at first, but afterwards become round and woody; the leaves are opposite, small, narrow, with six or eight bract-like leaves at the same joint; the flowers are blue, in terminal spikes; seeds small, ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... scale-like; sterile and fertile flowers separate upon the same plant; stamens (subtended by scales) spirally arranged upon a central axis, each bearing two pollen-sacs surmounted by a broad-toothed connective; fertile flowers composed of spirally arranged bracts or cover-scales, each bract subtending an ovuliferous scale; cover-scale and ovuliferous scale attached at their bases; cover-scale usually remaining small, ovuliferous scale enlarging, especially after fertilization, gradually becoming woody or leathery and bearing two ovules at its base; cones maturing (except in ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... leaflets. Staminate flowers in slender drooping catkins, borne in groups of three, occasionally on the new shoots, but usually from buds just back of the terminal buds on last year's shoots, calyx naked, adherent to the bract, unequally two-third lobed or cleft; stamens with short filaments, three to ten in number. Pistillate flowers, two to eight, produced on a terminal peduncle, calyx four-parted, petals none, styles two to four, short, papillose. Fruit oblong, or obovoid, the husk separating into ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume |
