Tiny Tuesday : : Stamens

The passionflower (passiflora incarnata) is weirdly beautiful. And when I read that the challenge today was 'stamens', it came immediately to mind. Ours now covers an entire arbor and still has lots of flowers on it. In our climate, the plant is deciduous and the flowers  only bloom for a day,  

When the conquistadors first discovered this plant in the sixteenth century, they gave it its name because they thought the flowers symbolized different features of the passion of Christ...the ten apostles, the crown of thorns, the five wounds, etc.

A detailed biological description of each part of the plant and its function is more fascinating to me, but I will stick to the fact that passiflorae have both male and female organs. The five yellow pollen coated bits are called anthers, which hang from a filament and together make up the stamen, the male organ of the plant. The three reddish tendrils at the top are the styles, with female pollen accepting organs or stigmas at their ends. The greenish white bulb that separates them is the ovary which stores seeds. The mechanics of all this equipment are described here, in the unlikely case that you find the whole thing as fascinating as I do.

Not only is this a weirdly beautiful flower with a lot of moving parts, but it took me a long time to delve through reams of information about hundreds of varieties of this plant just to find out which parts of it were the stamens.

I've put a picture taken from a different angle in extras because the fifth stamen isn't visible in my main picture.