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In gardening, a "bulb" is a plant's underground or ground-level storage organ that can be dried, stored, and sold in this state, and then planted to grow again. Many bulbs in this sense are produced by geophytes – plants whose growing point is below ground level. However, not all bulbs in the gardening sense are produced by geophytes.
A geophyte (earth+plant) is a plant with an underground storage organ including true bulbs, corms, tubers, tuberous roots, enlarged hypocotyls, and rhizomes. Most plants with underground stems are geophytes but not all plants that are geophytes have underground stems. Geophytes are often physiologically active even when they lack leaves.
Shallot bulbs Hippeastrum (amaryllis) bulb. In botany, a bulb is a short underground stem with fleshy leaves or leaf bases [1] that function as food storage organs during dormancy. In gardening, plants with other kinds of storage organ are also called ornamental bulbous plants or just bulbs.
Flowers and tuber of Anredera cordifolia. A stem tuber forms from thickened rhizomes or stolons. The top sides of the tuber produce shoots that grow into typical stems and leaves and the undersides produce roots. They tend to form at the sides of the parent plant and are most often located near the soil surface.
As the plants grow and flower, they use up the old corm, which shrivels away. The new corm that replaces the old corm grows in size, especially after flowering ends. The old corm produces the greatest number of cormels when close to the soil surface. Small cormels normally take one or two more years of growth before they are large enough to flower.
Storage organs may act as perennating organs ('perennating' as in perennial, meaning "through the year", used in the sense of continuing beyond the year and in due course lasting for multiple years). These are used by plants to survive adverse periods in the plant's life-cycle (e.g. caused by cold, excessive heat, lack of light or drought).
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Bulb: A short vertical underground stem with fleshy storage leaves attached, e.g. onion, daffodil, and tulip. Bulbs often function in reproduction by splitting to form new bulbs or producing small new bulbs termed bulblets. Bulbs are a combination of stem and leaves so may better be considered as leaves because the leaves make up the greater part.