Merous
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Merosity is used to designate that a flower has whorls of floral parts in the perianth. It describes how many segments the whorl of petals or sepals or tepals have in a flower. Thus if a flower has five petals that look the same, then the flower is called 5-merous or has pentamery. Types of merosity, according to number of whorled segments in the perianth include:
- dimery (2)
- trimery (3)
- tetramery (4)
- pentamery (5)
These nouns for the different types of merosity are formed by a prefix derived from Ancient Greek (e.g. tetra- for four) and the suffixed root, -mery, which is derived from Greek meros meaning "part" thus four parted.
Cyclic is a suffix that describes a flower with the same number of parts. Including petals, sepals and stamens, it refers to circles of different parts of the flower including the ovary that are compose of the same number of parts. Verbascum have penta-cyclic or 5-cyclic flowers with five sepals, a five lobed corolla and five stamens.
