What Is a Flower?
I believe that flowers are like people. Flowers come in different colours, shapes and sizes. Some extremely rare and some very common. They are all beautiful in their own unique way.
~ Alex Haditaghi, Iranian-born author of Softly, as I Leave Her
Vincent Van Gogh, Irises, (1889).
Getty Center, The J. Paul Getty Museum
A flower is a highly specialized plant stem made up of structures that together form the reproductive apparatus of a flowering plant. These structures include the brightly colored leaves familiar to us as petals, as well as male and female parts called the stamen and the pistil, respectively.
Pollination occurs when pollen, a powdery substance containing male sex cells, is transferred from stamen to pistil. If one or more of these cells makes its way to the ovary at the base of the pistil and joins with an ovule, fertilization occurs. Pollination often requires the work of animals such as bees, butterflies, and birds.
There are nearly 300,000 species of flowering plants inhabiting our planet; collectively, they are known as the angiosperms. The fossil record suggests that flowering plants first appeared 240 million years ago, although even Charles Darwin acknowledged that their evolutionary history was an “abominable mystery.”
Reproduction in flowering plants. (2011).
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Tiger lily in bloom showing pistil and stamens. Photo by Javier Alvarez.