Flowers make great gifts for loved ones, and there are many different types of flowers to choose from. Here are a few of the most popular flowers that can be given as gifts to your friends and family.
Flowers are the colorful, fragrant, and often edible reproductive parts of plants. They are usually arranged around the essential reproductive organs in a flower head, called a corolla.
Flowering plants
Flowering plants are an essential part of our natural ecosystems. They help with water and air quality by producing oxygen through photosynthesis, and they support biodiversity and ecosystem health by providing food for herbivores and pollinators. They are also an important source of medicine, with many species used in traditional and modern medicine.
Inside each flower is the male and female reproductive parts that enable the plant to reproduce. These are called the stamen and pistil. Pollen grains produced by the anther of the stamen move to the stigma of the pistil, fertilizing it and producing seeds. This process is known as pollination. Insects are the most common pollinators, but wind can also transport pollen between flowers.
After the flower reaches full bloom, it develops fruits that contain the seeds. Fruits are often brightly colored to attract animals that can disperse the seeds. Once fertilized, the seeds of a flower grow into a new plant and repeat the cycle.
Flower parts
A flower consists of four parts, or whorls—the calyx, corolla, and androecium and gynoecium. The outermost green protective whorl is called the calyx. It encloses a developing bud. Its job is to protect the flower until it is ready to open. The petals, which give a flower its color and smell, help it attract pollinators and fulfill the role of seed dispersal.
The male reproductive parts of a flower are contained in the stamen, which has two parts—the anther and filament. Anthers produce pollen grains that are transferred to the pistil via the filament. The ovary at the bottom of the flower contains the female ovules, which eventually grow into seeds.
The ovary is supported by a long, slender style that rises from the base of the flower and is topped with a stigma. The job of the stigma is to receive pollen grains from other flowers and transfer them to the ovules for fertilization, a process known as pollination.
Pollination
Pollination is the transfer of pollen grains from a flower’s male part (anthers) to the female part (stigma). The pollen then germinates on the stigma and grows a tube down into an ovary, fertilizing it to produce seeds. Flowers may be self-pollinating or they can be fertilized by sperm cells brought in from another plant (cross-pollination).
Most flowers are designed to attract pollinators, and their scents and colours appeal to a variety of bees, butterflies, moths, birds, flies and bats. About three-fourths of the world’s fruit, vegetable and nut crops rely on animal pollinators to reproduce.
Bees are particularly important pollinators because their long proboscises can access deep or tubular flowers. Their bodies and wings are also adapted for collecting nectar. Other important pollinators include ants, wasps, dipterans and coleopterans, along with mammals and beetles. They all perform vital, but often unnoticed, services for ecosystems and human food production worldwide. Without them, the world would not have strawberries, bananas, apples, pears, oranges, peaches, watermelons and many other foods.
Fruits
Fruits are the seed-bearing structures in flowering plants (also known as angiosperms). They are a means by which flowering plants disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits have spread throughout the world and, through the movement of humans and animals in a symbiotic relationship that is seed dispersal for one group and nutrition for another, have become an important part of our diet.
Fruits protect, store, and help to disperse the seeds of a flowering plant after fertilization. They are typically either fleshy or dry, and they may split open at maturity to expose the seeds. In some cases, such as with drupes, the outer fleshy part surrounds only a single seed.
Fleshy fruits develop from an inferior ovary that is attached to floral parts such as petals, sepals, and stamens. Other fruits, such as those of figs and pineapples, develop from multiple ovaries that mature together. They are also called aggregate fruits or multiple fruits. In some cases, floral parts other than the ovary can fuse to form accessory fruits, such as those of strawberry.
