Itsy Bitsy Flowers
Everyone loves flowers: big, beautiful flowers with delicate petals, vibrant colors and striking patterns. We relish our roses, obsess over orchids and pamper our petunias. But not all flowers are big and showy. There is a whole world of inconspicuous flowers that you’ve probably never noticed.
Unlike their colorful counterparts, inconspicuous flowers are tiny and dull. You might need a magnifying glass to find some. Others are clustered together, which makes them more noticeable. A common example is catkins, long, finger-like clusters of flowers usually found on trees, such as willows, oaks, elms and birches. Other examples of inconspicuous flowers include the balls of tiny flower produced by sycamore trees and the messy clusters of dangling flowers that hang from maple trees in the spring.
Other common examples include dogwood trees and the poinsettia. The “petals” on these plants are actually modified leaves called “bracts.” At the center of these bracts, the actual flowers are clustered tightly together in a bundle.
Some plants cluster inconspicuous flowers along a fleshy stem called a spadix. The peace lily is one such plant. It’s knobby flowers line a spike-like spadix collared by a white modified leaf. The humungous corpse flower is another such plant. Its spadix can be six to 12 feet tall and is ringed with teeny flowers.
A surprisingly large number of plants that produce inconspicuous flowers are also dioecious, meaning they produce both male and female flowers, sometimes on the same plant. Why this plants should produce equally drab male and female flowers mystified scientists. In the animal kingdom, evolution favors males with big, showy traits. Not so among dioecious plants. Apparently, showy male flowers can monopolize pollinators, leaving female flowers unfertilized. That’s no way to propagate a species. Keeping every Jane plain and every Henry homely allows for more equal access to pollinators.
Brian Rutter, PhD, is the cofounder of Thing in a Pot Productions and a postdoctoral researcher in plant biology at Indiana University. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our “Things About Things – Odd Facts About Plants” and video production tips in your inbox every month!
Works Cited:
Amorphophallus titanum (titan arum or corpse flower). libguides.nybg.org, 7 April 2023, https://libguides.nybg.org/corpseflower#:~:text=The spadix can range from,spathe perpetuates the meaty illusion.
The Challenge of teeny tiny flowers. usanpn.org, 2023, https://www.usanpn.org/nn/observe/nugget2
Vamosi, J. C., and S. P. Otto. "When looks can kill: the evolution of sexually dimorphic."