It’s Time to Flower!
The correct timing of flowering is essential to maximize reproductive success in angiosperms.
And many flowering plants rely on the photoperiod (specifically, the relative night length) as an environmental signal to tell seasonal time. (To see how, please see previous posts about How Plants Tell Time and Why Plants Tell Time.)
As mentioned in [...]
Archive for the ‘Flowering’ Category
How Plants Make Flowers – Part 5: Photoperiod, Biological Clocks, and Florigen
Posted in Flowering, tagged botany, garden, Nature, plants, science on November 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
How Plants Make Flowers – Part 4: Genetics of Flowering
Posted in Flowering, tagged science, plants, botany, horticulture, Nature, Gardening on October 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Long and Winding Road
So far, this journey through the subject of how plants make flowers has consisted of three parts:
Part 1, an introduction to the flowering hormone florigen,
…Part 2, how environmental cues affect flowering,
..and, Part 3, how the size and age of the plant itself may trigger flowering.
The Players
Because the genetic story of [...]
How Plants Make Flowers – Part 3: Endogenous Cues
Posted in Flowering, tagged botany, Nature, plants, science on October 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Is There a Single Flower-Inducing Hormone?
Florigen is the signal that triggers the transition from vegetative to reproductive development in plants that flower in response to photoperiod.
But some plants, that I’ll refer to “Night-Neutral” (a.k.a., “Day-Neutral”), apparently initiate flowering because of factors other than night length.
Such plants may flower after attaining a certain size or [...]
How Plants Make Flowers – Part 2: Environmental Cues
Posted in Flowering, tagged botany, garden, Nature, plants, science on September 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Many Plants Flower in Response to Night Length
For nearly 100 years scientists have been trying to identify the elusive flowering hormone called florigen.
Early in the last century two USDA researchers took a major step toward this by discovering how to induce flowering in plants under controlled conditions. In 1920, these two scientists, W.W. Garner and [...]
How Plants Make Flowers
Posted in Flowering, tagged botany, garden, Nature, plants, science on September 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Mystery of the Flowering Hormone
What if you discovered a chemical that, when sprayed onto the leaves of plants, would induce them to flower?
How much do you think the patent on such a chemical would be worth? Especially to the agricultural and horticultural industries.
And what if I told you that scientific evidence for the existence [...]
Bees and Flower “Velcro”
Posted in Flowering, Plant Development, tagged botany, Nature, plants, science on May 30, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Getting a Grip
Ever wonder how a bee or a butterfly can land on a flower and not fall off?
Me neither.
But thanks to researchers in the UK, we now have another reason why flowers are so marvelous.
Flowering plants have evolved chemical signals to attract pollinators to their flowers. Such signals include volatile chemicals to produce attractive [...]
How, When, and Where Did Flowers Originate?
Posted in Flowering, tagged botany, evolution, Nature, plants, science on April 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The First Flower?
How did flowering plants (angiosperms) evolve from non-flowering seed plants (gymnosperms)? Or did they?
When did the first flower appear on this planet?
And where on Earth did it occur?
These are some of the most hotly debated questions among botanists today. Partly because some of the fossil data is at odds with some of [...]
Why Plants Tell Time
Posted in Flowering, Plant Biological Clock, Plant Development, tagged botany, plants, science on February 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Last time we had a taste of HOW plants tell time.
But what, if any, are the adaptive advantages to plants for doing so?
It has long been presumed that the ability to anticipate day/night cycles gives organisms a fitness advantage. For example, this would allow plants to anticipate daylight and adjust their photosynthetic metabolism accordingly, [...]
Flowers: What You See Versus What the Bees See
Posted in Flowering, Secondary Compounds, tagged agriculture, botany, plants, pollination, science on November 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The eye of a honey bee (photo credits).
Flowers look very different to insect pollinators, such as honey bees, compared to what we mammals see.
As the photo on the left shows, bees have compound eyes.
How a bee sees patterns as a result of its compound eyes is wonderfully illustrated at Andy Giger’s B-Eye website.
Like humans, bees [...]
Plant “RAM”? – Some Plants Can Record Environmental Experiences For Future Reference By Altering Their DNA
Posted in Flowering, tagged agriculture, botany, ecology, plants, science on November 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Plant memory?
Can some plants access past experiences so that this information can be incorporated into new responses, such as flowering?
The answer is yes! (as illustrated in the photo on the the left).
This picture shows a cabbage plant that was grown for five years in the laboratory of Dr. Rick Amasino. (For size comparison the [...]
