Sunday, November 10, 2013

There must have been flowers

A surprisingly challenging concept for a botany professor to teach is that all flowering plants have fruit.  And every ripened ovary encasing seeds is a fruit.  And everything that has a fruit, by definition, had flowers.  And that most plants (including grasses, oak trees, and "weeds") are "flowering plants."

So that factoid that somebody taught you, "tomatoes are really fruit" is botanically completely true.  "Zucchinis are really fruit," "Cucumbers are really fruit,"  "Green peppers are really fruit,"  "Okra is really a fruit," and "Green beans are really fruit," somehow don't get told haughtily at school lunchrooms in the same fashion, but are no less true.
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Here's a sampling of my parents' fall fruit crop.  The flowers were probably stunning.

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