A flower, also known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants.

The flower structure contains the plant's reproductive organs, and its function is to produce seeds through reproduction.

For the higher plants, seeds are the next generation, and serve as the primary means by which individuals of a species are dispersed across the landscape.

After fertilization, portions of the flower develop into a fruit containing the seeds.

Many flowers in nature have evolved to attract animals to pollinate the flower, the movements of the pollinating agent contributing to the opportunity for genetic recombination within a dispersed plant population.

For more information about the topic Flower, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Plant sexuality — Plant sexuality deals with the wide variety of sexual reproduction systems found across the plant kingdom. This article describes morphological ...  > read more

Deciduous — In botany, deciduous plants, principally trees and shrubs, are those that lose all of their foliage for part of the year. In some cases, the foliage ...  > read more

Spore — In biology, a spore is a reproductive structure that is adapted for dispersion and surviving for extended periods of time in unfavorable conditions. ...  > read more

Asteraceae — The family Asteraceae or, alternatively, family Compositae, known as the aster, daisy or sunflower family, is a taxon of dicotyledonous flowering ...  > read more

Recommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:

Other bookmarking and sharing tools:

Related Stories

Secret Life of Bees Now a Little Less Secret (February 6, 2011) — Many plants produce toxic chemicals to protect themselves against plant-eating animals, and many flowering plants have evolved flower structures that prevent pollinators such as bees from taking too ...  > read more

Annual Plants Converted Into Perennials (November 11, 2008) — Scientists have succeeded in converting annual plants into perennials. They discovered that the deactivation of two genes in annuals led to the formation of structures that converted the plant into a ...  > read more

Genetic Snooze Button Governs Timing Of Spring Flowers (August 10, 2006) — In the long, dark days of winter, gardeners are known to count the days until spring. Now, scientists have learned, some plants do exactly the same ...  > read more

Evolution Experiments With Flowers (December 30, 2009) — Evolution uses every chance it gets to try something new. Researchers have now investigated how petunia flowers are formed and discovered that nature is even more varied than the naked eye can spot. ...  > read more

How Pollinators Sculpt Flowers (December 17, 2010) — For the past 10 years, researchers in Spain have used complex geometric analysis to study how insect pollinators influence the evolution of flower ...  > read more

Search ScienceDaily

Year 'Round Bloom