I highly recommend the book, even for non-technical plant lovers, simply because it shows the complexity of plant growth, and opens one's eyes to actually studying a plant, rather than just noting its color (for instance).
The way plants seem to grow and how they actually grow is often different, too.
I thought someone might question that in a cyme "the terminal flowers bloom first", which would seem not to be the case with semps and jovibarbas. Wouldn't one think logically that the end of what we see as the branch/spike/scape would be the terminus? And thus flowers blooming before the end are not terminal?
In the case of these two genera, each flower that blooms
is the end of the branch, and a new branch begins below the flower to produce the next flower that blooms. Meanwhile, yet another branch begins at the base of flower #2 to produce flower #3, and so on.
So the string of, say, eight blooms is actually 8 separate branches, botanically speaking, even though it looks like just one. Quite a revelation if you understand what I am relaying! Thus, a semp rosette that produces 50 flowers, actually has 50 branches!
