Flower Power
How do you have babies if you can’t walk? Ever wondered? It takes a special kind of power to do that, and flowers seem to be very good at it
Flowers are beautiful, they fill up our lives with their beauty, their perfumes, colours and shapes.
But did it ever occur to you that flowers are not there for us? Did you know that the flowers we like (the most scented and colourful ones) are tools for communication that plants have developed over millions of years?
In the Antropocene, the new geological era we are living in at the moment, in which humans and their activities are blamed for being the main causes for territories, climate and structure modifications, we sometimes forget that we still are just but one of the elements of this extraordinary thing that life is.
Life — in all the shapes it may express — itself is not there just for us.
What is a flower for?
First of all let’s unravel the real natural function of a flower (which is not making our living room table look nicer!): it is the sexual organ of a vegetal organism, and it’s there to have the male and the female parts of a plant meet in order to produce seeds, the progeny of that plant, the most important mechanism for a specie to survive to death. In the same way, for animals too, reproduction is a trick to overcome the fact that life is a fixed term contract.
And being this a major concern for living beings, they take it seriously and invest a lot in the task of reproducing themselves. Therefore, through millennia and thanks to the process of evolution and natural selection, a range of different solutions have been developed to solve the problem of having male part and female part meet in organisms that do not move.
I have found some interesting examples of solutions while having a walk in the Park, here at Villa Carlotta, at the very beginning of the spring season
The first example refers to Primroses: Primula vulgaris marks with its blossom the approaching of the warm season. It is a very common plant, and I am sure you have seen it. But had you ever noticed that there are two different types of flowers?
Here’s one
And here’s the other one
Can you see how different they are, in the central part?
If you dissect the two flowers you will see it in a better way:
By having two different kinds of flowers, with different reciprocal lengths of stamens and pistils, these plants promote cross fertilization.
Some flowers show a pin-eyed stigma rising above the pollen-bearing anthers; in other flowers, known as thrum-eyed, the stigma is below and enclosed by the anthers.
When an insect feeds on the nectar placed at the bottom of a pin-eyed flower the anthers will release pollen on him. If he later feeds on a thrum-eyed flower this pollen will be left directly on the stigma, which is in a perfect position for getting it.
On the opposite situation, if an insect visits a pin-eyed flower he will get pollen from the lower anthers, and will then accidentally release it on the stigma of a thrum-eyed flower, since it lies in a lower position in the flower.
This mechanism, selected by the evolutionary path of primroses, ensures efficient cross pollination.
Feeling Flower Nerd?
Want to know more about cross-pollination? I suggest you have a look at the online course available at PropaGate Learning, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh learning platform.
