Yes, you have the gist of it chelle.
[Botanists] separating individual parts by their function and by their contribution to the whole.
I couldn't say it better myself.
chelle said:So, if I added the very first picture to the DB it might be confusing to readers because parts of the disk flowers are missing, is that right?
If by "parts of the disk flower are missing" you mean "parts of the
flower head are missing", then yes, you understand.
The first pic shows the entire head of disk flowers; all parts of the disk flowers that should be there are there. But no ray flowers present. Without them, I am afraid readers will be looking for a flower that looks just like that, and not realize that ray flowers are part of the whole package. They would be very disappointed.
chelle said:From what's been said previously, Woofie, I think that the part we see and refer to as a petal sometimes isn't a complete ray flower, either, but just a section of it.
Except more often, "petals" in the vernacular sense are botanically "petals". Your inference is that all flowers have (complete or incomplete) ray flowers. Only a subset of the world's flowers have ray flowers at all. So more accurately, your statement should read:
The part we see and refer to as a petal sometimes is part of a ray flower, and is actually the corolla. But more often, what we refer to as a petal is part of a standard flower make-up, and not a ray flower.
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To distinguish between ray flowers and petals, you would need to dissect the flower head, and realize that a petal attaches differently and/or is accompanied by other plant parts that give you clues that it is one or the other. Not always an easy thing to do. Often, plant parts that you might expect to accompany are only vestigial or even absent, thus complicating things even more.
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Regarding the link you offer, woofie, overall very good. But it does irk me that the otherwise accurate site continually switches back and forth from "disk" to "disc". You will find that most real botanist stick to the standard "disk" rather than the newer form "disc". But younger folk nowadays, only ever see the word "disc" with computers, etc., and I expect that "disk" will become obsolete as the language evolves. Sigh....
edit to correct grammar error
