Ground Dogwood Flowers

This entry is part 78 of 133 in the series 2011 Photojournal

Closeup views of Ground Dogwood flowers.


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2 thoughts on “Ground Dogwood Flowers”

  1. Beautiful photo, Matt. I looked this up as I am writing up a MSc thesis on petal micromorphology just now. You may be interested (or already know!) that this not a flower, but an inflorescence, i.e. a group of tiny flowers (purple) surrounded by white bracts looking like petals. Each small purple flower (floret) in fact has 4 of its own true petals. In your photo these have not yet opened up, being still closed in bud – but they are quite clearly small individual flowers when you see them opened out. Hope this is of help!

  2. Thanks Peter – I had learned at some point that the white ‘petals’ were actually bracts, but obviously was not clear about it on this post! I appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment with a nice explanation. Do you know much about the pollinating mechanism used by this species? They are basically spring loaded (somewhere I’ve seen a high speed video slow-down of it on-line) and shoot the pollen when disturbed (generally be an insect). I’ve triggered them myself just for fun, a few times. I’m curious about what sort of things turn out to be significant in petal micromorphology – is there a reference somewhere that I could take a look at? Thanks!

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