Botany Explained - Know...

Botany Explained - Know Different Types of Flowers

Flowers are that nature’s gift which helps one to convey best wishes, congratulations, and sympathy and some other deep feelings like love, gratitude and apologies when gifted in a beautiful bouquet or a flower arrangement. To convey a different set of feelings or emotions, a particular kind of flower has been designated to do the work on behalf of your words.

When we say there are different types of flowers, it doesn’t mean the noteworthy changes in its physical appearance - like colour, structure, scent or size. Rather, we mean types of flowers as per the divisions made in Botany. As animals have been majorly classified as carnivores, herbivores, omnivores and scavengers as per the food habits of each of the animal species and as mammals, vertebrates, reptilia, amphibians, etc, as per their evolution and body parts. Similarly, there are two major kinds of flowers - monocots and dicots. But before we start discussing these two different kinds of flowers, let’s go through our plant kingdom.

The flowering plants are called Angiosperms, whereas the cone-bearing plants are called the gymnosperms. Bryophytes are small, non-vascular plants which play a vital role in maintaining the ecosystem balance, whereas Pteridophytes are those plants which neither produce flowers nor seeds but disperses spores. And the final group is that of Legumes which basically consists of all the pulses which are known to be the fruit or seeds of the plant. So, there are five main groups under our Plant kingdom, the examples for each of which has been provided below:

● Angiosperms - Flowers
● Gymnosperms - Cones
● Bryophytes - Mosses, Liverworts, Hornworts
● Pteridophytes - Ferns, Horsetails and Club Mosses
● Legumes - Beans, Peas and Lentils

Under angiosperms or flowering plants, there are almost 250,000 to 400,000 different flower types. Monocots are those plants that have one cotyledon, hence “mono” meaning one and “cot” meaning cotyledon. A cotyledon is that part of the plant where the seed develops. It is that part of the plant which contains the food for the growing embryo or the potential mini plant, which will have a single leaf. Talking of Dicots, “di” means two and “cot” means the same cotyledon as it meant in the case of monocot. Dicot flowers have two seed capsules and give rise to two leaves. It is a misconception that people often mix up things and assume that monocots or dicots would have one or two seeds, respectively - which is so not the case.

Mostly about one-quarter of all the identified Angiosperms are monocots and the rest are only dicots.

How to Spot The Difference Between A Monocot or Dicot Flower Plant?

● The leaves of a monocot have been parallelly placed along the vein throughout the tip of the vein without further branching out.
● The dicots’ leaves branch and start at the bottom to form an ordered network all over the leaves.
● If you have recently noticed a leaf growth, then you can actually spot the difference out by the way the seedlings push up through the soil. As told earlier, Monocots have a single leaf, whereas dicots have two leaves, to be precise.
● Monocots have a fibrous root system, whereas dicots have a tap root system.
● Monocots have petals and stamens in combinations of 3, whereas dicots have petals and stamens in multiples of 4 or 5.

Monocot vs Dicots:

Different types of flowers with pictures of each of these categories have been mentioned below. Starting with the monocot flowers and then moving onto some dicots ones to help you differentiate different kinds of flowers with name and picture.