changing the ordering of leaves in a dendrogram

I'd like to change the way plot.hclust displays an hclust object.

a description of how it's done now, from the R documentation of

     In hierarchical cluster displays, a decision is needed at each

     to specify which subtree should go on the left and which on the

     Since, for n observations there are n-1 merges, there are

     possible orderings for the leaves in a cluster tree, or

     The algorithm used in hclust is to order the subtree so that the
     tighter cluster is on the left (the last, i.e. most recent, merge
     of the left subtree is at a lower value than the last merge of

     right subtree). Single observations are the tightest clusters

     and merges involving two observations place them in order by

     observation sequence number.

I have a factor vector (if that's the right term) for the

I'd like to order the display of the leaves so that leaves of the same
level are grouped together as much as possible.  Even something as

as putting the higher average code on the left would help.

I've spent some time looking at the code in rpart, but I'm having a

time figuring out what I need to modify.  Or maybe someone's already

something similar?  Any help much appreciated!

   David Marimont
   NXP Data Analysis, Inc.
   http://www.nxpdata.com