ABSTRACT
In a 1971 review, Evans 1 noted that more than 1200 papers pertaining to flowering in higher plants appeared in a 6-year period in the late 1960s. The majority of the papers were devoted to angiosperms, but conifers were not neglected. Recent reports have related production of strobili in conifers to shade, root pruning, girdling, nutrition, drought, climate, root environments, and growth regulators. Virtually all trials have dealt with single factors at a discrete point in the ontogeny of the experimental material. Romberger and Gregory 2 suggest three reasons that such an approach may be inappropriate for elucidating mechanisms of flowering in perennial plants.
