Induction and Release of Bud Dormancy in Woody Perennials: A Science Comes of Age

The path to dormancy induction, maintenance, and release is a continuum and has been the topic of thousands of research articles to date. It would be an impossible task and indeed presumptuous of us to imagine that we could review all the research conducted on dormancy in the past century in this article. The multiple and complex nature of the dormancy phenomenon would require not one review but a series of in-depth reviews to cover the research on individual subdisciplines that come under the umbrella of dormancy. Its complexity and multiplicity of various subdisciplines stem from the fact that dormancy affects diverse plant structures (buds, seeds, bulbs, etc.) distinctly and that these dormant structures maintain distinct anatomical and physiological relations with neighboring parts. We, therefore, have chosen to discuss here only one, nevertheless highly significant, aspect of dormancy, i.e., bud dormancy in woody plants.