Sentence examples for pseudanthium from inspiring English sources
noun
An inflorescence that looks and functions as if it were a single flower.
In some sedges, the spikelets are reduced to the point where they simulate a single flower (a pseudanthium), and these highly reduced flowerlike spikelets may then also be arranged, as if they were true flowers, into structures that simulate spikelets formed from true flowers.
The highly reduced, unisexual flowers are grouped together tightly in such a way as to simulate a single flower (pseudanthium).
The subfamily Mapanioideae has a pseudanthium, or false flower, composed of a single terminal female flower surrounded by a number of naked stamens, each of which is subtended by a bract with the lowest two stamens situated opposite each other.
The pseudanthium is thought to be derived from a hypothetical prototype inflorescence in which a single female flower terminates an axis along which numerous male flowers are situated in the axils of bracts.
The reduction in the inflorescence was so extreme that it strongly resembles a flower hence the term pseudanthium.
The apparent flowers of other genera of Cyperaceae are thus also pseudanthia, and the seemingly simple, bisexual flowers of, for example, Scirpus, with three stamens and a single ovary, is actually a pseudanthium composed of three male flowers each with one anther and one female flower of a single pistil.
