Introduction

Flowers have held a place in human culture for millennia, valued as an aesthetic and highly symbolic element of everyday life - exchanging flowers has long signalled respect, affection, happiness and love. Yet the way people use and perceive flowers is quite different from their actual biological role: a flower exists to help a plant reproduce its own kind. This chapter turns to that reproductive side of plant life - flowers, how they are arranged into inflorescences, and the fruits and seeds that follow from them, together making up a plant's reproductive units.