Talk:Flower

Non-angiosperms in main image

The article's main image contains 4 images of non-flowers: reproductive structures of Picea abies, Pinus pinaster, Equisetum arvense, and Cycas revoluta, none of which are flowering plants. 171.66.12.183 (talk) 22:18, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Well spotted - that's been fixed now.  Junglenut |Talk  23:08, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 10 January 2024

"I Bet Your Mother Would Be Proud Of You"- Frank Ocean.... WhoBeKnockingOnTheirDoor (talk) 17:24, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Not done: Your request doesn't seem to be relevant, provided the page. If I am misunderstanding, feel free to reply with a more specific proposition. Urropean (talk) 18:39, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

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• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that a sunflower is not a flower?

• Source: https://archive.org/details/james-d.-mauseth-botany-an-introduction-to-plant-biology-2017-jones-bartlett-learning-libgen.li/page/227/mode/2up

• Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/December 2011 Christchurch earthquakes

Improved to Good Article status by Dracophyllum (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 6 past nominations.

Dracophyllum 05:13, 3 May 2025 (UTC).

• Another cheeky one; a sunflower is actually an inflorescence or group of many flowers. Dracophyllum 05:14, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

General eligibility:

• New enough:
• Long enough:
• Other problems:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Recent GA article checks out on sourcing, length, copyvio, etc. Next stop featured article? @Dracophyllum: It would be nice to include a photo, the sunflower in the gallery at the top of the page is very eye-catching. BuySomeApples (talk) 06:16, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

A sunflower inflorescence

• Cheers, if the prep makers would like, the following is a nice image. Dracophyllum 06:21, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

Peer review

Flower

Listing this because I've been encouraged by some editors to get it through FAC. Not sure if I have it in me, given my only other FA is a super niche plant. But if I do submit it, I figured this would be a good place to start.

Thanks, Dracophyllum 06:24, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

The image of flowers at the top includes the capitulum of Helianthus annuus which is a pseudanthial inflorescence, not a flower. Also, I think it desirable that text should mention pseudanthia, if only to distinguish them from flowers. Lavateraguy (talk) 14:14, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment, I wasn't aware there was a special term for these. I've included it in the Inflorescence subsection. Cheers, Dracophyllum, (1 PR) 23:04, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

UC

Commenting after a (very kind) request on my Talk page, and as a complete non-biologist:

• This is a very high-level article, which will attract a lot of general readers, younger readers, and so on. I find the "difficulty gradient" of the lead pretty severe: by the second sentence (Typically, they are structured in four sets, called whorls, around the end of a stalk.), I'm already a bit lost. Does this mean that flowers have four key parts? That they divide evenly into quarters?
• One place I do know some stuff is etymology:
  • Make sure that MOS:WORDSASWORDS is met: Flower is italicised when referring to the word rather than the thing.
    • Done
  • It comes originally from the Latin name of the Italian goddess of flowers, Flora: it would be more usual to call her a Roman goddess. It might also be useful to clarify that her name comes from the Latin flōs, flōris ('flower').
    • done
      • Actually, thinking on this, I need some serious persuading that the ME word (itself a pinched French word) comes from the goddess rather than, well, the flower. What's the sourcing like here? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:54, 5 May 2025 (UTC)
        • I actually have no Idea where I got this claim from. The sauce says:
        • flower [ME] Despite the big difference in meaning, flower and flour are the same word. In Middle English flower was spelt ‘flour’, but by the 17th century this spelling was limited to the specialized sense of ‘ground grain’. Flour developed from the meaning flower ‘best part of something’. It was then used for ‘the finest quality of ground wheat’, and from this developed the sense we have today. The word comes through French from a Latin root which also gives us flora and flourish (see faun).
        • Dracophyllum, (1 PR) 10:00, 5 May 2025 (UTC)
  • You might also wish to add that flower and blossom are cognates: they come from PIE *bʰleh₃ōs.
    • Done
  • The early word for flower in English was blossom: how early is early? I don't think we're talking about Old English here, at least not with that spelling.
    • bloom [ME] The early word for ‘flower’ in English was blossom. Old Norse blóm ‘flower’, blossom was the source of bloom in English, which shares a base with the verb blow [OE] ‘to burst into flower’, the now most often met in overblown [E17th]. A bloomer [L19th] is from the use of blooming for ‘bloody’ in blooming error and is thought to be Australian or Cockney slang. In the 1930s another bloomer entered the vocabulary as a name for a type of loaf but it is not clear where from. ||| So Middle English I guess, Per sauce, Dracophyllum, (1 PR) 10:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

    The OED here seems to say that "blossom" as a noun dates to Old English, but I can only see a tiny Google preview. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:08, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

    Yes, I have institutional access: Blostma, blosme was the Old English word for ‘flower’, previous to the adoption of Old Norse blóm (bloom n.1), and Old French flor, flur (flower n.). See bloom n.1 Dracophyllum, (1 PR) 10:13, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

    All useful stuff for the article, I think -- yes, we're not a dictionary, but if we're going to have an etymology section, we may as well have a really good one. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:36, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

  • Is it worth adding that bloom (variously spelled) is often seen in (at least) Middle English?
• Petals also tend to have patterns only visible under ultraviolet light, which are visible to pollinators but not to humans: reading this, I realise one of the reasons I'm finding the article a little tough going: we haven't actually explained what a flower is before diving into this quite complicated bit of morphology. I would suggest starting off with a very brief explanation as to what flowers do and why plants have them. After all, we haven't yet introduced the concept of pollinators. We do currently have a "function" section which does a courageous job of trying to explain all of its technical terms, but it's still perhaps a bit high-level and probably not suitable for a child for whom this article will be the first hit to answer "why do plants have flowers?".

Bibliography

• • Constible et al 2008 is uncited (there's a script to spot these).
    • rmved
  • In general, we don't write et al in the bibliography (WP:NOTPAPER), though I can see an argument if there are dozens of authors.
    • I'm prone to keeping them.
  • Work out a system of capitalisation and stick to it: we currently have a mix of title and sentence case.
    • I've gone for sentence case
  • Ditto for colons, which shouldn't be preceded by a space (MOS:COLON).
    • Fixed
  • ISBNs should be printed as they appear on the book, so those from e.g. the 1970s should have ISBN 10s.
    • done
  • Similarly, formatting should be consistent: use {{subst:format ISBN|9780000000001}} to automatically hyphenate, or remove the hyphens yourself.
  • Some journals have ISSNs, others don't. I like them, but don't insist; other reviewers do insist, as they assist with identifying the journal and verify that it does indeed exist. In any case, it should be consistent.
  • Some books have places of publication, others don't. Nobody insists on these, but the point about consistency applies. NB that the template documentation advises omitting the place when it's mentioned in the publisher's name: so e.g. Oxford University Press (Oxford), but not Harvard University Press (Cambridge).
  • Do we really need to cite a book from 1906 (itself a rework of one from 1873) -- has nobody else mentioned slugs and snails?

Small stuff

• I'm not sure that Simple models are used to describe this development does much good in the lead: it took me until reading the body to figure out what it actually meant in context, and I'm not convinced that "you can draw a diagram of it" is really vital information at this stage. It certainly doesn't get very much attention in the body.
• I would extend the link on "special genes" in the lead to make the target more intuitive: it looks now as though we are simply linking "special".
• In general, there is only one type of stamen, but there are plant species where the flowers have two types: this makes it sound as though only one type exists.
• The gynoecium, consisting of one or more carpels, is the female part of the flower found on the innermost whorl: is there a female part found somewhere else?
• Although this arrangement is considered typical, plant species show a wide variation in floral structure: remember that not all readers read the article linearly, so this needs to make sense to a reader who has just clicked on the word "Variation" in the contents table.
• "Specialised" is linked on second mention.
• We say, twice in quick succession, that some flowers use insects, bats or birds: the second time around, we add slugs and snails, which I didn't know.
• Is the D. in James D. Mauseth really part of his surname?
  • Fixed
• Rouhan and Geudel 2021: is "1" really the full title of their chapter? There's also a rogue angle bracket in the reference.
• Walker should be alphabetised before Weberling, and Rouhan before Rutishauser.
• Why is there a quotation appended to the bibliography entry for Bawa 1990?

That's a very quick overview, but I hope the points are useful. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 08:26, 5 May 2025 (UTC)