I cannot tell if plant 3 has a single set of opposite (palmate?) leaves or a whorl. At any rate, the leaf arrangement with a single flower on each stem stands out to me.
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I cannot tell if plant 3 has a single set of opposite (palmate?) leaves or a whorl. At any rate, the leaf arrangement with a single flower on each stem stands out to me.
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Thanks Justin,
a very minimalistic key, but it gets the job done. Botanists tend to avoid using “no” and “yes” as a description of a couplet. So you could have used: A. Coniferous trees with needles … plant 1 and A’. Trees, shrubs or annuals with various leaf shapes….. B.
B. Single terminal flower with purple petals on stem ……. plant 3
B’. Multiple flowers with white petals (or apealous) variously arranged into an inflorescence…. C.
And then under C. you could use the unisexual flowers arranged in a catkin (plant 4) vs. perfect flowers in a raceme for C’ (plant 2). Generally speaking dichotomous keys tend to use more than one character per couplet, but for this exercise one character is fine. Well done.
Justin – In this exercise, I also found plant 3 to have prominent characteristics like the fancy leaf whorl. Since I couldn’t think of a dichotomy to pair with the leaf arrangement that didn’t already exclude the other plants, I didn’t get to use it. It was hard leaving out an observation since I really wanted to talk about it!