Cone is a term used in Botany, with considerable latitude and variety of application. The growing point or bud of any ordinary higher plant is of more or less acutely conical shape, and the young leaves at first arise in close succession upon it. But while in vegetative growth the axis usually lengthens and the leaves develop and expand, the onset of reproductive functions may check these changes. In the simplest cases the leaves may become partially modified for pollen or ovule bearing, as stamens or carpels, while the leaf apices do not wholly lose their leafy character and arrangement; thus we have the cone-like male and female flowers of Cycads (q.v.). In the allied conifers, which include the most characteristic cone-bearing trees, the leafy character of the crowded stamens composing the male flower may be almost entirely lost; but in the female the structure of the familiar cones (e.g. Scotch fir, spruce, larch) has been the subject of enormous controversy; since from one point of view it is regarded as a single flower composed of many carpellary leaves (each bearing a biovular placenta on its upper surface); while from the other it must be viewed as an inflorescence of which the crowded bracts bear axillary biovular branches (see GYMNOSPERMS). The cones of Conifere may vary greatly from their typical shape, witness the almost spheroidal cones of Araucarias, while the number and crowded succession of the leaves in ordinary cones may be much reduced and simplified—e.g. cypress.
The apparent cones which occur in some orders of dicotyledonous plants are always due to a crowding of the inflorescence. Thus, the so-called cone of Casuarina (q.v.) is simply produced by the crowding of the fruit; that of Hop or Gale (q.v.) by the overlapping of the leafy bracts which conceal the small reduced flowers. But the term is with advantage disused by most botanists outside the limits of the Gymnosperms.