noun
definition
A discrete organ in the center of a flower capable of receiving pollen and producing a fruit, it is divided into an ovary, style and stigma.
example
Some plant species have more than one pistil per flower.
Examples of pistils in a Sentence
The mouth of this chamber is protected by a ring of hairs pointing downwards, which allow the entrance but prevent the escape of small flies; after fertilization of the pistils the hairs wither.
The system of Linnaeus was founded on characters derived from the stamens and pistils, the so-called sexual organs of the flower, and hence it is often called the sexual system.
Nehemiah Grew seems to have been the first to describe, in a paper on the Anatomy of Plants, read before the Royal Society in November 1676, the functions of the stamens and pistils.
Camerarius, professor of botany and medicine at Tubingen, published a letter on the sexes of plants, in which he refers to the stamens and pistils as the organs of reproduction, and states the difficulties he had encountered in determining the organs of Cryptogamic plants.
In the latter division of plants he could not detect stamens and pistils, and he did not investigate the mode in which their germs were produced.
In the simplest instances the pollen of one flower fertilizes the ovules of another on the same plant, owing to the stamens arriving at maturity in any one flower earlier or later than the pistils.
In double flowers transformations of the stamens and pistils take place, so that they appear as petals.
Falling pistils mark the end of the developmental cycle of the individual pistillate calyx.
The former fires red tails to cherry bursts with red pistils whilst the latter provides red and blue mines bursting into silver chrysanthemums.
It must suffice here to say that double flowers are most commonly the result of the substitution of brightly-coloured petals for stamens or pistils or both, and that a perfectly double flower where all the stamens and pistils are thus metamorphosed is necessarily barren.