Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Seasonal Essay for May

May
This is the month to talk about what it is that April showers bring: flowers. And one of the first flowers to appear is the dandelion. It sprouts along roadside grass strips, in fields and to most people’s dismay, in lawns. That flower which most of us think of as single, is in fact a tight cluster of many tiny florets. It is what botanists call an inflorescence. Some inflorescences like the snapdragon are elongate with large distinct florets. Others like the daisy are made up of many densely-clustered fertile florets in the center (the eye of the flower) and an outer circle of conspicuous, sterile, single-petaled florets, the ray florets.
If we take a dandelion flower and, looking at it sideways, split it open with a thumbnail into two halves, we can see its multiple nature. If with a hand lens we look at one of the tiny individual florets we can see that it has a pistil with a divided tip (the female component), that the pistil is wrapped around with five pollen-producing anthers (the male part), and that each elongate yellow petal has five lobes at its tip which represent five fused petals. When mature, each floret takes off separately in the breeze with its tiny umbrella, carrying a single seed in a protective coat.
So plants have more than one way to attract pollinators. They can, like some lilies, produce a few large showy flowers, each producing dozens of seeds, or, like the dandelion, cluster many small florets into a showy inflorescence, each floret making one seed, but the inflorescence making many.