“…Mesostages are incorporated between the primary and secondary stages representing the temporal or spatial variation in the occurrence of principal stages (Bleiholder et al , ; Lancashire et al , ; Hack et al , ). Both the BBCH scales (simple and extended) have been widely used to describe phenological stages of many fruit crops such as citrus (Agusti et al , ), banana (Gonzales et al , ), guava (Salazar et al , ), kiwifruit (Salinero et al , ), mango (Hernandez‐Delgado et al , ; Rajan et al , ), avocado (Alcaraz et al , ), lychee (Wei et al , ), custard apple (Liu et al , ), sweet cherry (Fadon et al , ), longan (Pham et al , ), jujube (Hernandez et al , ), pear (Martínez‐Nicolás et al , ) and pineapple (Zhang et al , ). Development of such scale for precise and standardised description of phenological stages of bael is essential for research experiments, breeding programmes, conservation of germplasm and crop management (Gotor et al , ).…”