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| Title | Gay Austin, Vol. 3, No. 8, May 1979 |
| Contributor |
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| Publisher | Gay Community Services |
| Date | May 1979 |
| Language | English |
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| Identifier | OCLC: 5962538 |
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| Rights | No Copyright - United States |
| Note | This item was digitized from materials loaned by the Gulf Coast Archive and Museum (GCAM). |
| Title | File 013 |
| Transcript | 12 may 1979 Gay Austin vol. 3, no. 8 AUSTIN BOTANICAL NOTGS '-£oA_ Those plants with large pink flowers growing along with bluebonnets are named Oenothera (pronounced ee-noh-THEER-ah.) They grow wild throughout the south and usually flower all spring. In my opinion they really ought to be cultivated and if I had a flower garden, I'd plant them. They have four petals, eaight stamens and a single pistil whose stigma has four branches. Close examination of a flower will reveal that the bases of the petals are fused with the sepals and together they form a tube, at the base of which sits the ovary. If you slit the ovary with a sharp knife, razor, or fingernail, you can see the numerous white "ovules." The pollen is shed in a rather unusual way. Instead of individual grains sifting out of the anther, the pollen comes out in masses attached to long, thin, sticky strands of material like a spider's web. These plants are also called "primroses" and "buttercups" by some people, but this can be quite confusing because there are many unrelated plant species which have those as common names. 'pollen ar (yj&xgzbzzgLs Aflpci&i, Most people have the notion that pollen fertilizes a flower and that makes a seed. This idea is simple-minded and not really correct. The more botanically accurate story is this: pollen is formed in the anthers and gets transported, usually either by wind or insects, to the stigma. There the" pollen grain breaks open (germinates) and a very small plant grows out of it and into the tissues of the stigma and Style. This small plant, called the male gametophyte, is a relatively long, microscopic tube which contains two to three cells. One of these cells divides and makes two sperm cells. The ovule is not itself an egg. Rather, it is the structure which contains the female gametophyte. The female gametophyte is an oval sac which contains about eight cells, one of which becomes the egg. When the male gametophyte has grown all the way to the female gametophyte, one sperm unites with the egg cell and an embryo begins to grow. The other sperm cell unites with two of the other cells of the female gametophyte and from this union of three cells grows the tissue of the seed which will provide the nutrition for the embryonic plant. V Diagram of male and female gametophytes just prior to fertilization (the tissues ofthe pistil are all stippled) An. JjvJLyJ? J^JVL. cn)<yuf J J to&ailvLX, ~uuu nakuxAXfL- |
| File Name | uhlib_5962538_v003_n008_012_ac.jpg |