inflores1

waxflower, jamesia americana, hydrangeaceae

Real and Imaginary
Inflorescences

By Anne M. Burns
Department of Mathematics
C.W. Post Campus of
Long Island University
Brookville, NY 11548

e-mail aburns@liu.edu

The inspiration for this web page comes from the diagrams of the common inflorescences in the book Taxonomy of Flowering Plants by C.L. Porter, W.H. Freeman and company, 1959, 1967, introduced to me by Orland Blanchard, Professor of Biology at C.W. Post

"An inflorescence is the arrangement of flowers on a plant, or the mode of flowering. It may be very simple and readily distinguishable, or it may be a highly complex structure whose precise nature is not evident at a glance. We may try to force all flower arrangements into a set of rigidly defined types, but it should be remembered that it is not always possible to make variable plants fit such a system." [Porter, Taxonomy of Flowering Plants]

The diagrams in Porter's book are simple stick figures with small disks representing the individual flowers. When I first saw these diagrams, I thought, here are great examples of recursion for my Computer Graphics class. On this page you will find two java applets. The first applet draws copies of each of the inflorescences in Porter's book, and allows the user to see what they look like at various stages in the recursive process. The second applet draws purely imaginary inflorescences at various stages using the recursive functions in the first applet, but this time using them two at a time, where the function replaces the disk in Porter's diagrams by a second inflorescence. The code from either applet can be downloaded. I have also included on this page several photos I have taken of real inflorescences, and several examples of imaginary inflorescences that I have created using computer graphics techniques.

Some Real Inflorescences

Wood Betony, Lousewort
Pedicularis canadensis