This being the result of an examination of a small branch left lying in the road somewhere near where we live, probably left over from some late clipping.
Google Images suggests Euonymus japonicus, the Japanese spindle of reference 2, a plant which comes in lots of varieties, many with variegated leaves. We may well have some of these last outside our back extension, one of the few things which will grow on this very shady slope.
Most of the leaves turned up by Bing have round ends or toothed margins, but not both. The image above, however, has both, and feeding it back into Google Images, he more or less confirms the identification.
Back with my branch, the leaves are all green, pointed, slightly toothed and with the blades ranging up to 2.5 inches long. Shiny on the upper, sunny side, matt underneath. The leaves are arranged in opposite pairs along the stem, rotating around 90° at each step. That is to say the pairs alternate up the stem; an arrangement I now know to be called 'decussate', from the Latin. With steps varying, but of around an inch.
Prominent buds in the axils of the leaves at the proximal end of a stem, but they appear to shrink away as one goes down the stem. Perhaps to nothing, perhaps to dormancy. Some of all of this can be seen in the zoom above of the snap at the top.
A small proportion of the undersides are speckled yellow, as is the leaf in the middle, above. I return to these speckles below.
Zooming in on a terminal bud. Two prominent buds above the below the terminal bud, buds which I believe to be axil buds of the penultimate pair of leaves. One of the ultimate leaves, marked with an orange spot, but its pair has been lost, leaving a visible scar at the base of the terminal bud.
The bulge to the right of the scar is perhaps the growing axil bud, while the two bulges to its right are perhaps the next pair of leaves, arranged at right angle to the presently ultimate leaf, the survivor of the pair already mentioned. With the growing tip, as yet not visibly differentiated, far right.
One can do quite well with zoom, with the laptop doing quite a lot better than the telephone on the same image. In the olden days one must have had to work rather harder to get the same amount of information.
Examination of the other terminals has not produced any singletons: new leaves seem to be produced in pairs, not one after the other. So even pinnate rather than odd pinnate, in so far as those terms are applicable at all.
And there must be a lot of stem growth, below the terminal, after the leaves have appeared. The green shoots must be flexible enough to cope with cell growth and division in their length, as it were, as well as at their tips. Topologically speaking a rather different matter. Time to turn to Thomas at reference 3.
Here a lead shoot has been lost, with a pair of axil buds moving up, as it were, to take its place, with their two leaves getting lost along the way. Notice that the two news shoots are not quite opposite, as is the case with some of the pairs of leaves. Both the new shoots are alive and well in the top snap.
All this despite the telephone failing to focus on the feature of interest. Not easy to know that at the time.
I assume that secondary shoots develop from axil buds on primary shoots. But if that is the case, why have none of the corresponding leaves survived?
Quite a lot of scars where leaves have been lost. Sometimes the scar looks more like a dormant bud than the crescent of attachment of a leaf no longer there.
Aside: these crescents of attachment can be quite large - inches rather than millimetres - on the twenty year old trunk of the ash tree at the bottom of our garden.
PS 1: reference 3 had turned out well, just what I was looking for, so I thought I would go for my own copy, to find that it had held its value rather well, with it going secondhand for around £50, which was more than I wanted to pay. But eBay did me one at less than half that, and the only catch turned out to be that it was the first edition rather than the second. For my purposes the difference was that the later edition was in a slightly larger format and the illustrations were coloured. But for my purposes again, black and white will do nicely, at least to start with.
PS 2: Gemini on the yellow bumps, noticed above. We went on to find the brown knobs and streaks of the females on some of the larger stems. The only catch being that this does not agree terribly well with the presumably reliable story at reference 4. Both the position and the appearance of the males seems to be wrong.
The (unsolicited) story according to Copilot. I liked the 'small armoured pests' bit. We also have references 5 and 6. There are clearly lots of different kinds of scale insect and maybe, without being able to look at the pictures and relying on my words, Gemini has picked one which is common but which is not the right one?
Some sources talk of the scales favouring the veins of leaves, presumably because they are good for sap, mainlining as it were, and some of the images turned up by Bing support this, with the one above from Thompson & Morgan, the plant and seed people, at reference 7. While the yellow speckles on my image do not look to favour veins.
Gemini, however, is not much disturbed by any of this and sticks to his guns, with considerable elaboration - and another dose of gush. A small part of the former is included above.
To be revisited tomorrow.
PS 3: the next morning: supplementary. I had remembered that my father's apple trees suffered from scab and canker, amongst various other complaints, mostly treated with unpleasant smelling sprays. Gemini explains that these are quite different, fungal complaints, Venturia inaequalis and Neonectria ditissima respectively, nothing to do with scale insect, although aphids do interact with canker. Wikipedia knows about both and, on a very quick look, tells a much longer, but corroborating story. Gemini appears to have done a good job at summarising a complicated story from my point of view.
PS 4: Bing turns up what looks like the very sprayer, less most of its parts. Heavy thing to carry about, and I usually stood it on the ground to use it - the hoses being quite long. And the washers (of present interest) being mostly leather. While left we have a more modern version, complete.
For the nursery left, Bing offers reference 8, from Bombay, while Google Images offers the confusing snap above which leads to the similar reference 9. Are they the same place?
Inspection suggests that they might be, not far from the Bombay beach snapped above from gmaps. 'Opposite Tulip Star Hotel, Inside Vailankanni Auto works Compound, Side Nursery, Juhu Road, Mumbai – 400049'. The immediate interior does not look very like Bournemouth at all - or even Yarmouth - here in the UK.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/odd-pinnate-2.html.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euonymus_japonicus.
Reference 3: Trees: Their natural history - Peter A. Thomas - 2014.
Reference 5: https://extension.umd.edu/resource/introduction-scale-insects/.
Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_insect.
Reference 7: https://www.thompson-morgan.com/pests/scale-insects.
Reference 8: https://krishnanursery.net/.
Reference 9: https://krishnanursery.in/.
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