Microscopy of White gerbera daisies

Gerbera daisies are the fifth most popular flowers in the world and are hugely used in gardens, bouquets, flower arrangements, etc. They closely resemble to sunflowers since they both belong to the same family Asteraceae. These flowers appear in different delightful colors like red, pink, orange, yellow and white.

 

Gerbera was named after the German botanist Traugott gerber and Gerbera daisies were discovered in the year 1884 by botanist Robert Jameson. This plant is native to South Africa but now its cultivation extends to South America and tropical Asia.

The flower has multiple rings of gradually increasingly large overlapping petals surrounding the central dark disk. It shows three different type of florets. The dark central disk contains “disk florets”.  Around this disk is a ring containing intermediate “trans florets”.  Finally, the outer petals constitute a final ring of “ray florets”. The yellow structures are the male stamens (pollen producing organs) of the trans and ray florets.

Here is how the whole flower looks like, apologizes since I couldn’t click the picture of the uncut flower and had to upload it from a website.

 

However, to examine the pollen grains I delicately extracted the stamen from the flower and dissected it. The following are the pictures of Gerbera daisies dissected stamen showing pollen grains which I captured through my microscope.