Rutgers Gardens, New Brunswick, NJ - USA

Abscission (from the Latin ab meaning away and scindere meaning to cut) is a term used in several areas of biology to mean shedding of various parts of an organism. In plant sciences, it most commonly refers to the process by which a plant drops one or more of its parts, such as a leaf, fruit, flower or seed. In zoology, the term may be used to describe the intentional shedding of a body part, such as the shedding of a claw husk, or the autotomy of a tail to evade a predator. In mycology, it may refer to the liberation of a fungal spore. In cell biology, abscission refers to the separation of two daughter cells at the completion of cytokinesis.

A twig is a small thin terminal branch of a woody plant. The buds on the twig are an important diagnostic characteristic, as are the abscission scars where the leaves have fallen away. The color, texture, and patterning of the twig bark are also important, in addition to the thickness and nature of any pith of the twig.

There are two types of twig, vegetative twigs and fruiting spurs. Fruiting spurs are specialized twigs that generally branch off the sides of branches and leading twigs, and are stubby and slow-growing, with many annular ring markings from seasons past. The age and rate of growth of a twig can be determined by counting the winter terminal bud scale scars, or annular ring marking, down the length of the twig.

In photography, bokeh (Originally pron.: /ˈboʊkɛ/, pron.: /ˈboʊkeɪ/ BOH-kay — also sometimes heard as pron.: /ˈboʊkə/ BOH-kə, Japanese: [boke]) is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image. Bokeh has been defined as "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light". However, differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—"good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.