Plants use flowers to transfer their pollen and make seeds. In this section, you will have a chance to learn about flowering plants. Please don't pick any flowers to look more closely; let the plant live where it is growing and instead you can visit it, take a picture or make a drawing that you can label.

This is a picture of a Trillium (In what province Trillium the provincial flower? Click here to see if you guessed right)

There are millions of different types of plants in the world, but most of them have these basic parts:

(light + water + carbon dioxide = water + oxygen + sugar)
Leaves and other parts of the plant are green because they contain a pigment called chlorophyll which absorbs red light, and emits green light. That makes the plants look green. (Hint, remember for the quiz later...)
 

Plants, like people, make new plants by combining female parts and male parts. Plants, unlike people, can have male and female parts on one flower (monoecious), or separate (dioecious). The male part produces pollen that is transferred to the female part where it is fertilized and made into a seed or fruit. The seed or fruit will then be released from the mother plant to germinate and grow in a new place.

Pollen can be transferred in a few different ways:

Animals - bats pollinate some plants by picking up the pollen when they are feeding on the plant's nectar
 
Insects and Birds - these critters are attracted to flowers by their brightly coloured petals and lovely scent. The insects and birds drink the nectar and get some pollen dust on their bodies as they are drinking. The next plant they visit will receive some of the pollen from the bird and hopefully the pollen will travel down the stigma and become fertilized. Click here for a photo of a bee pollinating a flower.
 
Wind - some pollen is so light and aerodynamic that it can fly to other plants. An example of this is the pollen from grass that makes people sneeze in the spring. We call this an allergic reaction.
 
Water - other plants have floating pollen that drifts around until it meets a female flower to pollinate. Canadian pondweed (found in fishtanks) is a plant like this.

Seeds will germinate when these conditions are just right:

temperature, moisture, sunlight, soil type, pH

The seed contains some food from the mother plant, so it can begin to grow immediately. Once it has developed a few roots and some leaves, it can make its own food by photosynthesis.

(pH is a measurement of how much acid or base is present in soil or water. A low pH number means something is acidic - like orange juice or vinager. A high pH means something is chemically a 'base').

Click here to learn more about seeds.

Well, there aren't any. So now you want to know how pine trees and other flower-less trees can spread their pollen. Well, this is a long story that goes far back in time. There are a few different groups of trees (botanists calls each group a 'phylum'). There are two main phyla - flowering and cone-bearing. So, the ones without flowers have cones!

Click here to learn about cone-bearing trees.
 

learn more about it...

Another way plants attract insects is by having a strong scent. This leads the insects to the flower where they will drink the nectar and receive the pollen along the way. Diagram
 

There are lots of words that botanists use to describe flowers. The words aren't always the most important part, but learning what each part does and being able to recognize them is. If you would like to learn more, go to your library and search for books about Plant Biology.

Click here to learn about plants that don't flower!