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Updated: June 26, 2025
The numbers of stamens, or of carpels are dependent on nutrition, but their fluctuation is not known to have any attraction for the visiting insects. If the deviations become greater, they might even become detrimental. The flowers of the St. Johnswort, or Hypericum perforatum, usually have five petals, but the number varies from three to eight or more.
Bees could hardly be misled by such deviations. The carpels of buttercups and columbines, the cells in the capsules of cotton and many other plants are variable in number. The number of seeds is thereby regulated in accordance with the available nourishment, but whether any other useful purpose is served, remains an open question.
Those which we commonly call the seeds of the strawberry, then lie on the surface, and these, if carefully examined, will prove to be the carpels containing the seeds in a little thin shell like a small nut. The strawberry is, therefore, not, properly speaking, a fruit; it is a fleshy receptacle, bearing the fruit on it, which fruit is, in fact, the ripe carpels.
It is a case exactly similar to that of the supernumerary carpels of the pistilloid poppy, and the deductions arrived at with that variety may be applied directly to double flowers. This dependency upon nourishment is of high practical importance in combination with the usual effect of the doubling which makes the flowers sterile.
Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had worked their miracle of form and fragrance and colour, the ripened carpels waited, conscious of the crown of tall golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated yet with the beating of celestial wings.
These carpels are so crowded together, that they at last grow into one mass, and form the little thimble-shaped fruit which we eat, the juices of the receptacle being all absorbed by the carpels, which eventually separate from it, and leave the dry cone below.
Such a branch-system is called an inflorescence. The primary function of the flower is to bear the spores. The flower may consist only of spore-bearing leaves, as in willow, where each flower comprises only a few stamens or two carpels.
I succeeded in making them very weak and slender, without being able to diminish the number of the supernumerary carpels. The proportionality of the size of the central fruit and the development of the surrounding crown can often be modified or even destroyed by this means, and the apparent exceptions from this rule, which are often observed, may find their explanation in this way.
Boil together for five minutes one pound of sugar, a half pint of water and the juice of one lemon; take from the fire, add at once the carpels, stir lightly until they are thoroughly covered with the syrup and stand aside until very cold.
We rode along, mile after mile, wondering at many things. First, the innumerable dry fruits of Timit palm, which lay everywhere; mostly single, some double, a few treble, from coalition, I suppose, of the three carpels which every female palm flower ought to have, but of which it usually develops only one.
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