page_title: Pollination
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Pollination / History
context_page_description: Pollination is part of sexual reproduction in plants. It describes how the pollen grains get to the female parts of a plant. Pollen grains, which contain the male gametes, need to get to where the female gamete are.
  What happens is basically the same as sexual reproduction in animals. Each pollen grain is haploid: it has half of the DNA that is needed to make a new plant. During fertilization this combines with the DNA that is in the egg of the female part and a zygote is formed. In seed plants a seed is started.
context_section_description: A full understanding of pollination is quite recent.
  In 1672 Nehemiah Grew had some idea that pollen was the means of fertilisation in higher plants. Using a microscope, he was the first to describe pollen in detail. This led to the discovery that all pollen grains in a species were alike. The study of pollen grains is called palynology. It is much used in micropaleontology. Sex in plants was discovered in 1694, when Rudolf Camerarius put his discovery into a letter.
  In 1793 Christian Sprengel  (1750–1816) published a work on the pollination of flowers by insects which made all the main points. Unfortunately, "his work was so far outside the standard thinking and interests of the period that it was almost completely ignored".
  Two lines of work solved the main issues. One was done by studies of how the pollen cells worked to fertilise the ovum, and the other was to recognise the coevolution of the animal pollinators and the flowering plants. Both these lines of work became essentially 'modern' in the middle of the nineteenth century.
caption: Sprengel remembered: a small plaque designed after the frontispiece of his book is in the Berlin Botanical Gardens
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