In this topic you will learn about how flowering plants reproduce.

Complete flowers have sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils. An incomplete flower is missing one or more of these parts. Perfect flowers have both male and female parts, that is, both pistil (female part) and stamen (male part). Imperfect flowers have either pistil or stamen, but not both.

All seeds develop in the same way. A pollen grain must be transferred from a flower's anther to its stigma, a process called self-pollination, or to another flower's stigma, called cross-pollination. Pollination is the transfer of a pollen grain to the egg-producing part of a plant. Pollen grains contain sperm that travel to the stigma, down through a growing pollen tube, and into the flower's ovary, where a sperm cell combines with, or fertilizes, an egg cell. A seed develops from this fertilized egg cell.

A seed is made up of three main parts. One part is an embryo. An embryo is an immature plant inside a seed. Another part is where food is stored in the form of starch. The third part is the seed coat. The seed coat is the outer covering of a seed. It encases the whole seed in a tough, protective covering.

For a seed to produce a new plant it must move from the flower to a place where it can sprout. A warm temperature and water are the two most important needs for sprouting, or germination. Animals help move seeds by eating fruits. A fruit is a mature ripened ovary of a plant. An ovary is a structure that contains egg cells. The animals digest the soft part of the fruit, but not the hard seeds inside. As the animals move from place to place, they deposit the seeds in their wastes.

Since gymnosperms don't produce flowers or fruits, their life cycle is not the same as the angiosperm's life cycle. A conifer, such as a pine tree, produces male and female cones on mature trees. The cones carry the plant's sperm and egg cells. When pollen grains fall from a male cone, the wind carries them through the air. If a pollen grain happens to land on a female cone, fertilization may take place. The fertilized cell eventually becomes a seed. Then the seeds scatter. If they end up in a place where conditions are right for germination, a new pine tree will start growing.

Flowering plants produce almost all the plants you eat, including the flowers themselves, fruits, seeds, leaves, stems and roots.