On Mon, 4 Nov 2013 Janet wrote:

In article ,
says...

On Sun, 3 Nov 2013 Farm1 wrote:

"Chris Hogg" wrote in message
news

The direction that climbers twine is controlled by their genetics.
Some, e.g. hops, climb from right to left, but the majority, e.g.
beans and bindweed, climb from left to right*. Nothing to do with
which hemisphere they grow in, or the direction of the sun's travel
across the sky, as many seem to think.
* http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictiona...Twining+Plants


Thank you. Working off your cite as a base, I've since found out that this
way of twining is called dextrorse and twining in the other direction is
called sinistrorse.

Well, not quite! Dextrose is a sugar.

and not the word she used, Dextrorse with an R after the T

Yes, I looked up dextrorse in online dictionaries and couldn't find it
so assumed it to be a typo. Silly me!

Chambers definition of Dextrorse "rising helically and turning to
the left, crossing the observer's field of vision from left to right
upwards".

The OED gives a similar definition; "rising toward the right, esp. of a
spiral stem".

That'll teach me to be a bit more careful!

David

--
David Rance writing from Caversham, Reading, UK