I think there is no need to fear basic questions, especially when a person is taking their first steps in knowledge. If these basic questions are not resolved, it is difficult to build later. That is why today I will dedicate myself to a topic as initial as it is important: inflorescence.
Gardening books can confuse: flowers, inflorescence, clustered flowers … how are they different? ¿What is the inflorescence of a plant?
Flowers and inflorescences
While the inflorescence It refers to the flowers does not speak of them in the singular but as a whole. In general, the flowers do not appear in isolation but together and then the inflorescence is nothing other than the way in which the flowers are grouped, it speaks of the flower arrangement on the branches or the end of the stem.
If when reading the description of a plant, the word inflorescence appears, it refers to the grouped flower set.
As we said, in most of the plants the flowers appear grouped but there are some species that have a single flower and in this case we are still talking about uniflora inflorescence. If, on the other hand, the plant has two or more flowers, it is called pluriflora influence.
Most frequent provisions
The flowers are grouped in many ways and that is why there are several types of inflorescence that are grouped into two large groups: simple and compound.
Here at the simple inflorescence all flowers have the same structure whereas in the compound inflorescence there are many simple structures.
In turn, the simple inflorescences are grouped in raceme, spike, umbel (flowers that seem to come out of the same point), chapter (the flowers are grouped above the flower receptacle) and corymb (all flowers at the same height located at along an axis) while in the case of compound inflorescences they are grouped in panicle and compound umbel, as is the case with carrots.
