My favourite flowering image: the remarkable inside-out flowers of Lacandonia

Abstract

Abstract Flowers are deceptively simple structures, characterized by a determinate primary axis that bears organs in condensed concentric zones in a strict structural and temporal sequence. Few species have escaped these constraints, but those that have can provide insights into the evolutionary history of flowers if placed in the appropriate phylogenetic and developmental context. For my flowering image, I selected a longitudinal section of a Lacandonia flower, which breaks a fundamental rule of spatial arrangement: the flowers are ‘inside-out’, with the carpels surrounding the stamens—a pattern that is almost unique among angiosperms. When viewed in the context of the family and order to which it belongs, this species has led me into many fascinating areas of comparative and evolutionary plant morphology.