Wildflower Terminology (With Apologies)

Calyx. What in the world is a calyx? And glabrous? Is that a Star Wars character? What about peduncle? Is that when you’re older than your mother‘s brother?

Sadly, these are terms associated with wildflowers, and I would be remiss in my attempts at sharing these bits of botany if I didn’t spend a little time on them. I apologize in advance...or two paragraphs in, anyway. I’ll dwell on some of the basic lingo only, which, in itself, may be cause for an aspirin or two.

Let’s consider a kind of generalized, generic flower...

We’ll begin with the peduncle, which is simply the stalk of a solitary flower, or the main stalk of an, ahem, inflorescence. An inflorescence is simply a flower cluster. There is also a pedicel, which is the stalk of an individual flower that is part of an inflorescence.

Moving up our generic blossom we encounter the sepals. I’ve mentioned sepals many times so this is a useful definition. Sepals, which are collectively known as the calyx, are modified leaves, usually green but not always. For example, three of the six petals of an iris are, in fact, sepals.

The petals, I suspect, need no definition, but what of the goods inside? The business bits? The glands? (Got your attention now, huh? Okay, send the children out of the room.)

The female bits begin with the ovary, which is the enlarged base of the pistil, and is where the seeds are produced. The ovary tapers into the style, which is the stalk supporting the stigma. The stigma is the pollen-receiving tip of the pistil.

The male bits in our generic flower are the stamen, which stick out around the centrally located pistil. Each stamen consists of a filament that supports an anther. This enlarged part of the stamen produces the pollen.

And that’s the basic stuff...

There are more terms, some as innocuous as those above, such as disk flower and ray flower. Disk flowers are the tiny, tubular flowers such as those found in the central portion of sunflower. This central portion is called the disk, and is surrounded by the petal-like ray flowers.

Other useful terms, which come in handy in Scrabble, when impressing friends over dinner, and when reading some of these wildflower articles include bract, corolla and, are you ready for this, cleistogamous. Bracts are small or modified leaves that grow at the base of a single flower or an inflorescence. Corolla refers to the complete set of petals in a flower. And, yikes, cleistogamous refers to a flower that does not open and usually self-pollinates.

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