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What shape is honeysuckle?

If you ever ask anyone to draw a flower it will usually be five or six petals surrounding a round centre with a stalk and two leaves.  There are flowers like that, of course, but I never cease to be amazed at just how many different shapes (and colours) they actually come in.  I was watching the programme about the Queen the other night and noticed that when she was visiting Australia someone gave her a bunch of Kangaroo’s Paws (Anigozanthos).  The only reason that I recognized them is that there are lots of them in the Great Glass House at the National Botanic Garden of Wales.

If you’re looking for different shaped flowers, the Botanic Garden is a good place to go.  There are hundreds of different plants there and probably as many different shapes.   When I was there earlier this week I was thinking about the different shapes and a daffodil leapt out in front of me shouting “What about me?”   Of course, there am I thinking of the exotic and right under my nose the common or garden daff.  If you wanted to dream up a shape for a flower a daffodil would probably not be your first choice but everyone knows what they look like – even if they couldn’t draw one.

 

If you’ve ever tried to identify a wild flower using a book you will know that you need to know  how many petals, whether they are free or joined, whether the flower is pea-shaped, if it has an upper lip and a lower lip, whether it has spurs and so on.  I’m exaggerating a bit, of course.  One of my favourite things is just to look through my wild flower books until I find a picture that looks like the plant I’ve seen in the wild.  It’s not very scientific but it works for me.

Another of my favourite things is to walk around the Botanic Garden just looking and being amazed.  Some of the flowers are difficult to describe, other things speak for themselves.  The flowers on a bottlebrush plant look like just that – a bottle brush.  Have you ever thought about what shape honeysuckle is?  What shape is an iris?   How would you describe the flowers on witchhazel?    We always think of a daisy in terms of being a simple flower but if you’ve ever read a description of a daisy in a flower identification book you will know that they are not as simple as we think.

 

The whole range of the amazing shapes, colours and fragrances in the beautiful flowers that we see everywhere, are all there for one reason and that is to attract pollinators.  So the next time you look at your favourite flower try to work out what it is that makes it special, either to you, to the world at large or to some unknown insect or bird.  What about really looking at a flower that isn’t one of your favourites, to see if you can find something special in it.

Pam Murden