14 - Outlook

Summary

Floral diagrams build the foundations for the understanding and identification of flowers. The process of constructing diagrams is comparable to an architect laying the foundations of a building. It allows for the understanding of the special relationships of organs in the flower and ultimately captures the information to predict relationships with pollinators and occurring evolutionary trends. It is not always an easy task to capture floral diversity by floral diagrams. To be fully comprehensive, several volumes would have to be written, comprising several hundred detailed drawings. Flowers represent dynamic entities prone to influences of the environment, interactions with pollinators, pressures during floral development and genetic shifts. How a flower looks at maturity is largely caused by the processes affecting the floral development, with subtle shifts in time and space causing major changes in the floral morphology (discussed in Ronse De Craene, 2018, 2021). These changes allow us to predict trends in the floral evolution and reflect the apomorphic tendencies found in different clades. However, certain characters on floral diagrams are conservative so as to reflect where a taxon belongs and can be used for identification at least to family level.