A PQ tree represents its permutations via permissible reorderings of the children of its nodes. The children of a P node may be reordered in any way. The children of a Q node may be put in reverse order, but may not otherwise be reordered. A PQ tree represents all leaf node orderings that can be achieved by any sequence of these two operations. A PQ tree with many P and Q nodes can represent complicated subsets of the set of all possible orderings. However, not every set of orderings may be representable in this way; for instance, if an ordering is represented by a PQ tree, the reverse of the ordering must also be represented by the same tree.