Beautiful and ubiquitous, but they have a serious job.
- When did flowering plants develop?
- What do calla lillies and sunflowers have in common?
- What is the point of flowers?
- What are bracts?
- And what’s the picture?
Answers here.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I don’t know the answers to the first three, but a bract is a part of the plant that looks like the petals of a flower, but isn’t, usually it is just a brightly coloured leaf, close to the actual flower which is quite tiny. The bright “petals” on a bougainvillea are bracts.
And that flower is a corpse plant. It apparently smells like rotting human flesh. It flowers once in a very long time, for a short time. The flower is apparently huge-tall as a person. One flowered in a botanical gardens locally (Qld) recently, it made the news.