Looking Up to Flowers

Sassafras tree

Trees, shrubs, and some vines display blossoms in lofty canopies to carry on the business of all flowers, making more plants.

Ruby-throated Hummingbird and apple blossoms

Flowers that rely on visiting pollinators to accomplish fertilization are likely to develop showy petals. Bright inflorescences also catch the attention of people, for whom the relationship is more aesthetic than functional‒which shifts but does not diminish its value.

Big-toothed aspen flowering

The flowers of wind-pollinated plants while not so showy are nevertheless interesting and beautiful to anyone who contemplates natural form and purpose.

American elm flowering

American elms also rely on the wind to achieve fertilization of their seeds.

Alder-leaved buckthorn

Some plants bear tiny flowers that produce fragrance or sugars to attract insect pollinators without offering ostentatious visual guides.

Black locust

The peas family is represented with fabulous diversity at Halibut Point, from beach peas at the shoreline to locust trees in the uplands. They all bear racemes of flowers with legumaceous similarities.

Grape

Not surprisingly grape flowers cluster in the same pendulous configuration as the fruit that will emerge at maturity.

Virginia creeper

Like the grape, the Virginia creeper vine produces just enough wood in its stems to clamber aloft toward sunlight over more heavily structured shrubs and trees.

European barberry

In looking up at flowers, is it important to distinguish between a shrub and a tree? Most people, and experts, think of shrubs as multi-stemmed woody plants growing up to sixteen feet tall, and trees as more likely single-stemmed reaching high in the sky. But these categories will be found to mix on an arbitrary spectrum.

Red maple

Regardless of botanical templates woody plants exhibit flowers as fascinating as herbaceous ones do.

Grey birch

The male flowers of birch trees produce pollen in long petal-less clusters called catkins that develop in summer, remain tightly closed all winter, then expand and blossom in early spring to fertilize the much smaller female catkins.

Flowering dogwood

Numerical increase of our native dogwood must be attributed more to its visually stunning flowers than to its ability to set seed.