Botany: Plant  Flower and Inflorescence Morphology
Channel: ScenseMe
Date: 29/12/2023

Delivered on: 5 DECEMBER 2022


Flowers are sets of highly modified leaves that function to attract a pollinator or, if no animal pollinator is used, to optimize spore dispersal in some way. Over the course of evolutionary history and coevolution, this has lead to an incredible diversity of shape, size, color, smell, and just about any other characteristic you can think of.

Because most plants are angiosperms and because flowers are often so diverse, learning the terminology to describe flowers is a major step in learning to identify plants.

The modified leaves in flowers are called sepals, petals, stamens, and carpels. 

These components are arranged in whorls and attach to an area called the receptacle, which is at the end of the stem that leads to the flower. 

This stem is called the peduncle. In the case of an inflorescence, where multiple florets are produced in place of a single flower, the stems leading to the florets are called pedicels.

Inflorescences
An inflorescence is when, in the place of a single flower, multiple florets are formed. 

Florets can be sessile or attached by a stem called a pedicel. When leaf-like structures are found within the inflorescence, they are called bracts. 

There are a wide range of possibilities for the structure and development of inflorescences, though most can be split into four models: raceme-based, cymose, panicle, and intercalate

Ovary Position
We can use the location of the ovary to further distinguish between flowers. If the other whorls of the flower meet below the ovary (the ovary or ovaries look a bit like an egg or eggs in a nest), the ovary is superior (on top of the rest of the flower). This means that the rest of the flower parts are below the gynoecium, so we can also call this flower hypogynous (below the gynoecium). The two terms both describe the same situation, but superior refers only to the ovary while hypogynous refers to the flower, in general.



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