Shoot responses of young red pine to watering applied over two seasons

Abstract

Young red pine (Pinus resinosa Ait.) trees were grown under three watering treatments from late summer until early fall and under two watering treatments again the next spring. Size of apical buds, date of bud swell and bud burst in the spring, number of needle fascicles on the new shoots, shoot length, and needle-fascicle spacing were related to the first treatments. Most of these plant responses were correlated with bud size, and the correlations were unaffected by the spring watering treatments. The effect of treatments was on magnitude only, i.e. on mean sizes or mean numbers of the plant organs.In all cases in this experiment watering treatments during elongation had no effect on the results. Therefore in a species such as red pine, with determinate height growth, environment during bud formation played an important role in determining later shoot responses by acting on the bud size.Possibly the relationships reported here are genetically characteristic, unalterable by environment or at least by water alone. In this case the effect of environment on the trees was a proportionate increase or decrease in the size or number of plant organs.