Hi everyone!
My name is Brianna. I’m a psychology major in my last semester. I’m taking this class to fulfill my credit requirements, but I’ve always loved plants and this course seemed interesting to me. My favorite flowers are sunflowers, which I got a tattoo of when I turned 18. Looking forward to this course!
Welcome Brianna,
we had another girl in the class a few semesters back and her illustrated introduction was all about her botanical tattoos. Sunflowers are very fun, and have a complex inflorescence structure. Yes, each of these yellow petals in the sunflower are actually a single flower (ray floret) put together into this head of flowers – the capitulum, with the brown disk flowers in the center. See below for a diagram from https://depositphotos.com/. It will be fun to explore members of the sunflower family for your observations in iNaturalist, but you would need to cut the flowers open and take pictures of these for positive ID, so a bit more work than just snapping a picture on your walk in the woods. Welcome!