A feature of dicotyledonous trees and shrubs, being the tissue laid down inside the bark cylinder by the dividing cells of the cambium layer. It consists largely of a cellulose framework with the denser carbohydrate lignin deposited in the cell walls. The living outer part (sapwood) is the main tissue by which water and dissolved nutrients are conducted upward through the tree, and its cells contain starch (which provides food for borers). ‘Woods’ is an alternative term for forest, especially in the USA, while in gardening ‘wood’ is used with various qualifying adjectives to indicate the stage of maturity of a plant’s branches or twigs, as in ‘new wood’, ‘old wood’, ‘previous year’s wood’, and so on.