“Birds and the Bees” of a Flower

“Birds and Bees” of a Flower

May 5, 2011

Working in our Botany Book we had a project to “dissect” a flower.

At first we tried with small flowers. That was way to hard so we went to my moms and swiped a couple flowers from her to get some that was large enough to take apart accurately.

We found some Showy Primroses.

As a kid we called them buttercups and I remember playing tricks on people telling them to smell the flower the pushing it on to their nose leaving an abundant puff of yellow pollen on the tip of their noses, sweet childhood memories.

We laid out our flowers, ready to dissect.

First we took off the calyx (the group of sepals all together) and labeled the parts.

Next we pulled off the petals, Anna started, “He loves me, he loves me not…” as she plucked the petals. The petals as a whole are called the corolla.

Then we talk about the girl and boy parts of a plant. The stamen is the boy part. Of course Adam started just calling it the “boy parts” and “girl parts.” We labeled the anther (pollen producing top piece), the filament (the pole that the anther is on), and both together is the stamen.

Now to the “girl part”. As a whole it is called the carpel; it is made up of the stigma (with the sticky pollen catching parts), the style (the tube that carries the pollen to the ovary), and the ovary (that contains ovules “eggs,” which turn into seeds.)

We finished discussing the “birds and the bees” (literally) of the flower’s God given purpose to be fruitful and multiply.

I had a bright idea and decided to laminate our project, which worked out pretty good but some of the flower parts had a lot of moisture and squished when going through the machine and left a little flower juice mark on the page but it still turned out great and now we can use them to discuss further lessons without the worry of them falling apart.

We all had fun learning about how wonderfully God made even the smallest detail of the flower.