Semi-Technical Description of a Typical Flowering Plant

A Standard Format for Describing Any Flowering Plant

When a taxonomist writes up a description of a flowering plant for identification or comparison, the description is not composed freely; it follows a fixed order of characters every time, so that descriptions of different plants can be compared directly against one another and no important feature is missed. Because this format uses precise botanical terms while still being written as readable prose rather than reduced entirely to abbreviations and symbols, it is called a semi-technical description.

Habit, Habitat, and the Vegetative Body

The description begins with the plant's overall habit (herb, shrub, tree, or climber) and its habitat, the type of place where it is ordinarily found growing. It then proceeds through the vegetative organs in a set order — root, stem, and leaf. The root is described as tap or adventitious, with any special features (such as nitrogen-fixing nodules) recorded. The stem is described by its texture (herbaceous or woody) and habit (erect, climbing, twining), and the leaf by its type (simple or compound), its arrangement on the stem (alternate, opposite, whorled), its venation pattern (reticulate or parallel), and whether stipules are present. Unusual vegetative habits are noted at this stage too — for example, geocarpy, a phenomenon in which the fruit develops and matures underground because the flower stalk elongates and pushes the developing fruit into the soil after fertilisation, as seen in groundnut.

Moving Through the Floral Whorls

After the vegetative account, the description turns to the flower, again working through a fixed sequence: the inflorescence (how the flowers are arranged on the plant — raceme, cyme, solitary, and so on), the flower itself (its symmetry, whether actinomorphic or zygomorphic, and its sexuality, whether bisexual or unisexual), and then, whorl by whorl, the calyx (sepal number and fusion), the corolla (petal number, fusion, and shape), the androecium (stamen number, fusion, and anther structure), and the gynoecium (carpel number, fusion, ovary position, and placentation type). The fruit type is described last among the plant's own structures, since it typically confirms the identification already suggested by the floral characters.

Closing with the Diagram and the Formula …