You know how they say to “stop and smell the roses?” Well, that practice applies to pretty much every growing thing out there! There’s often a vast world of change happening right before your very eyes. And if we aren’t careful, we’ll miss it completely! It sometimes happens so fast that we rarely take much notice.
The birth of a raspberry is one such example that we like to use. The shift from a flower to an actual raspberry is not this instantaneous thing that occurs. It’s a metamorphosis, a process. It begins with a flower, which leads into pollination and ends up as a ripe fruit that ultimately improves our life.
If you slow that process down, or better yet stop it in time completely – you can see an entire process that occurs!
Raspberries are a super interesting plant. They are what’s called an aggregate fruit. Biologically, what this means is that each flower has multiple ovaries. When a bee comes along to pollinate the flower, each of these ovaries are pollinated. Eventually, this causes the flower to develop these alien looking extents called carpels, which are basically the beginnings of dozens of individual fruit. It’s these carpels that eventually form an “aggregated” fruit, which occurs as each of these super tiny fruits compete and ultimately merge together.
If you give it some thought, there’s probably other berries you can likely think of that also grow in this fashion, such as the blackberry. You might not immediately think it, but the strawberry actually grows fruit in a very similar way as well.
This is very different from something like a tomato, where you have a single ovary developing into a single fruit. This is probably closest to our understanding of human biology, so it’s easy for us to understand. But then, you have some really wild forms of reproduction such as how a pineapple forms. This fruit forms where multiple flowers (and thus entirely separate ovaries) aggregate into a singular fruit.
The depths of this kind of plant biology are happening all around you. We look at our plants and and often, we just see a sea of indistinct green. But, when you really look up close, you can see all these things in various stages. It’s a window into a world that we barely understand!
If you want to understand more about your plants, we definitely recommend to “stop and smell the roses” as it were. Watch closely as flowers develop. View closely as leaves unfold. Peer into how a fruit forms. This kind of look at our plants is a whole different way of looking at things and for us, has given us a whole new level of appreciation and understanding for plants, flowers and fruit!
