Seed to Seed by Nicholas Harberd

Author:Nicholas Harberd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

The layers of the flower. An idealised cross-section taken roughly halfway between top and bottom of the flower, showing the concentric circular whorls from which it is constructed: sepal, petal, stamen, carpel.

This flower is a terminal structure. The final product of a succession of meristems. At the beginning, the shoot meristem made organs in spirals. Continuously, without any clearly defined end to the process. First, as vegetative meristem, it made a stem and spiral of leaves. Then, as inflorescence meristem, it made more stem around which it twined a spiral of floral meristems. And then it was destroyed.

But that destroyed meristem left the bud-meristem legacy. Every floral meristem contains an end point within itself. It is determinate and makes four closed rings, not a continuing spiral. Four whorls of organs in a defined order: first sepals, then petals, then stamens, then carpels. At that point, the making of organs ceases. So the flower is an ending, a culmination of the progression of meristems: vegetative, inflorescence, floral.

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