Randomly Selected Botanical Terms: Phyllaries

Flowers in the aster family have one of the most recognizable shapes in botany – a circle with a series of petals surrounding it. If you were asked to draw a flower, there is a good chance your drawing would look something like a sunflower, a daisy, a cosmos, or an aster. It’s one of the most basic flower shapes, and yet it isn’t a single flower; it’s a pseudanthium – a false flower. This is because what might appear as a single flower is actually a collection of tens, hundreds, or even...