Interesting facts about buds and flowers

From the buds to the flowers

The deciduous walnut tree is a hermaphrodite or monoecious (monoecious) plant. This means nothing more than that both male and female buds form on the tree in winter.

Note: At a young age it can happen that the walnut tree only produces male or instead only female flowers. With the years and the increasing maturity of the tree, however, the distribution usually adapts so that both sexes are represented.

Male flowers

The male flowers are usually composed of several rather thick, cylindrical inflorescences. These inflorescences are called catkins. They are about six to twelve centimeters long and contain one to four million pollen grains.

Female flowers

The female flowers grow at the end of the fresh shoots. They either sit alone, in twos, threes or together in small ears of around 18 to 20 heads.

Heyday

The walnut tree usually blooms between April and June. A special feature occurs here: the male flowers usually appear three to four weeks before the female flowers.

Femininity (called protogyny in technical jargon) occurs only rarely, in which the female flowers start before the male flowers are sexually mature.

Self-pollinating wild blood

The real walnut is a self-pollinating windflower - that means nothing else than that the pollination of the walnut tree is done by the wind.

Note for those interested: The wind flowering is known as anemophilia.

The female inflorescences of the walnut are fertilized by the flight of pollen, so that they gradually turn into spherical, green-shelled fruits develop, under whose shell the main attraction of the walnut tree grows: the edible kernel that contains so many healthy ingredients having.

Note: For a few Varieties of the walnut tree there is an apomixis in which the walnuts develop fruit without any fertilization.