R help - May 2009 - meaning of order-vector in object of class hclust

I'm trying to export the dendrogram created in R such that I can rebuild it
inside an other program. However, I don't fully understand the relation
between the merge, height and order vectors.
This is what I do grasp. The merge-matrix shows how the original
observations were merged into a tree structure. The height-vector contains
the heights for each of the nodes in the tree. The order of the merge-matrix
and the height-vector is the same. This means that row *i* in the matrix
corresponds to row *i* in the vector.
Then there is the order-vector. The documentation describes it as follows:

order a vector giving the permutation of the original observations suitable
for plotting, in the sense that a cluster plot using this ordering and
matrix merge will not have crossings of the branches.

So far, I get it reorders the nodes to prevent overlapping branches, but I
don't understand how the values in this vector correspond to the values in
the other two structures. So what does row *i* in the order-vector say about
the other structures? Should I reorder the merge-matrix and height-vector,
according to the values in the order-vector, before constructing the tree?

Hopefully someone can explain to me how this works. Thanks in advance for
any help you can provide.

Kind regards,
Pieter

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