We are looking for wild plants within the Phlox Family (Polemoniaceae) which have some proportion of flowers with irregular petal numbers. Most plants in Polemoniaceae have 5 petals, but some have 4 or 6 or even as many as 10 or as few as 1! This is a little like looking for 4-leaf clovers. If possible, please take pictures of any flowers/plants you find so we can count the number of ...more ↓
We are looking for wild plants within the Phlox Family (Polemoniaceae) which have some proportion of flowers with irregular petal numbers. Most plants in Polemoniaceae have 5 petals, but some have 4 or 6 or even as many as 10 or as few as 1! This is a little like looking for 4-leaf clovers. If possible, please take pictures of any flowers/plants you find so we can count the number of flowers with irregular petals (if any).
We're trying to figure out how common irregular petal number is, and whether it varies by species or geography, so observations with normal petal number are ok too.
Petal number also might be related to what species of insect or bird is pollinating the flowers, so we would welcome observations of the kinds of pollinators observed.
We're focusing on Phlox, Gilia, Leptosiphon, and Ipomopsis in the southwestern United States, but we would welcome any observations of species in the Phlox family including Woolystars (Eriastrum), Collomia, Linanthus, Jacob's Ladder (Polemonium), Microsteris, and Pincushionplant (Navarretia)
This data will be used for research being done at the University of Connecticut.
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Petal Number in the Phlox Family
mickley
created this project on March 3, 2014
