budding

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• adjective Being in an early developmental stage.

from The Century Dictionary.

• Producing buds: as, a budding tree.
• Being in the condition of a bud; figuratively, being in an early stage of growth; being at the entrance of a period of life, a career, etc.: as, a budding orator.
• noun In botany, the putting forth or producing of buds.
• noun In zoology, gemmation; a mode of asexual reproduction in animals analogous to budding in plants.
• noun In horticulture, a process, allied to grafting, for growing a different variety of fruit or plant from a given stock by transferring a bud with a little of the woody tissue behind it to a cleft in the bark of the stock.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act or process of producing buds.
• noun (Biol.) A process of asexual reproduction, in which a new organism or cell is formed by a protrusion of a portion of the animal or vegetable organism, the bud thus formed sometimes remaining attached to the parent stalk or cell, at other times becoming free; gemmation. See Hydroidea.
• noun The act or process of ingrafting one kind of plant upon another stock by inserting a bud under the bark.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• adjective That is beginning to develop.
• verb Present participle of bud.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun reproduction of some unicellular organisms (such as yeasts) by growth and specialization followed by the separation by constriction of a part of the parent
• adjective beginning to develop