SYCs review

OK a couple of readers don't quite get the disk/ray flower thing that TPP mentioned in last week's FFF on goldenrod.  So here is a better example, the ordinary sunflower, Helianthus annuus.  This is not a flower, it is an inflorescence that mimics a flower's image.  When you have little flowers, best to group them together because the bigger the display, the more visitors you get, the more pollination, and so on and so forth (my major professor always used to say that when he thought the explanation was obvious).  At any rate what appear to be petals are a ring of ray flowers with one long corolla lobe making the ray flowers highly bilaterally symmetrical.  They surround a spiral array of radially symmetrical disk flowers.  The inner most ones are still unopened buds, so start taking a close look at those composite "flowers".  Dandelions have all ray flowers, and others have nothing by disk flowers.  Enjoy.  

Friday Fabuous Flower - SYC

This has been a hectic couple of days.  The F1 bought a house (pretty exciting), the neighbor girl got married (also pretty exciting), the Phactors attended a memorial service for TPPs graduate mentor (kind of sad, but he lived a good, long life of continual learning), did too much driving in nasty traffic around Indianapolis (the hated loop), popped in to Jungle Jim's for a quick shopping trip (quite an adventure as always).  That's rather way too much, oh, and several other invitations for this and that had to be declined for lack of time.  
At any rate at this time of year, the pickings get a bit thin, and only SYCs are common (stinking yellow composites).  This is a nice species for your wild flower garden, the showing goldenrod, Solidago speciosa.   Like all composites (aster/sunflower family) goldenrods have little flowers in heads that include either both, or just disk flowers.  The ray flowers are often mistaken for petals when they are arranged around the outside of flat-topped spiral array of disk flowers (think daisy).  Most goldenrods have just ray flowers in rather small heads, but a few species have ray flowers too and these often help produce a quite showy display in this case 5 or 6 ray flowers surrounding a few disk flowers.  The entire terminal cluster is being visited by a beetle, a bee, and a butterfly. 

Ligularia in flower

Midsummer means lots of lilies and ligularias in this instance Ligularia japonica are in flower. It should be obvious that this is a member of the sunflower family, but that isn't so obvious to everyone. A recent visitor remarked, "Oh, that one has a big flower." In fact the flowers are pretty small, but they are grouped together into a large flat disk of an inflorescence that produces the image of a large flower. Each of the yellow "petals" is an individual ray flower whose corolla is a big strap shaped affair narrowing at its base to a little tube. The rest of the flowers are disk flowers with short symmetrical corolla tubes and you can see unopened disk flower buds in the center. So there are several dozen flowers open. The style extends out of each flower and the bilobed style makes a double loop at the top. Flowers open first around the margin (bottom) and proceed to open in towards the middle (top). No question that insect pollinators are reacting to a "floral" image presented by this inflorescence.