Plants flowers are the most attractive part of a gardening plant. Their range and shades of colours, their shapes and sometimes their fragrance are all what attract you to your favourite gardening plants.

But, if plants where without flowers many of them would never be grown, why?

Because they would just be different unassuming sizes, shapes and different shades of greens.

Just picture an Iris without it's flowers, what would you have? No more than sabre shaped leaves standing upright.

Or imagine a rose without flowers, it would just be a framework of branches with thorns and green leaves. You wouldn't give it a second look, would you?

But nature did not adorn plants with beautiful flowers for your benefit. A plants flower has one special purpose. And that is to ensure the plants survival for future generations.

A flower is simply modified and highly coloured leaves designed to attract and encourage passing insects to visit.

The whole game plan of plants flowers is getting insects to carry pollen from another plant and deposit it on the pistils of it's own flowers to start the initial fertilisation process.

As a further enticement to get some insects to visit, most highly coloured flowers produce nectar at the base of the corolla.

As insects search for the nectar in a flower they brush against the pollen which adheres to their bodies until they visit another flower where the sticky tips of the pistils, stigmas, drag it off their bodies so it can be used to fertilise the seeds.

So that's why nature gave plants flowers, so they can reproduce.

And you can take advantage of the flowers nature gave plants, in more ways than one.

You can enjoy their beauty, splendour and sometimes their aromatic fragrance.

But you can enjoy them not just for their beauty, splendour and sometimes their aromatic fragrance, you can also enjoy them for the new plants they can give you absolutely free.

After you have enjoyed the flowers beauty and fragrance at the end of the flowering season the flowers will fade, wilt and eventually fall away.

This leaves a pod full of ripening seeds just waiting to burst open and scatter the seeds far and wide.

Now you can take advantage of this in one of two ways.

You can collect the seeds as they ripen or you can let the seeds scatter, leave them to germinate where thy fall and then dig up the seedlings to plant in pots or in your garden.

If you want to collect the seeds it's really quite simple. You to do this just before the seed pods bursts open, scattering the seeds in the process.

The seedpods will only open when the seeds inside are ripe, this gives the seeds the best chance of germinating, unripe seeds do not germinate.

You can normally tell when a seedpod is ripe and ready to open by the colour. It will change from green to a greyish brown or light brown colour. It will also start to slightly open, the top begins to just peel back.

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