Our Green Hour Challenge #14 Bursting with Color: Composite Flowers

This week's Outdoor Hour Challenge for us was very enjoyable. Our flower garden is just bursting with color and with garden flowers as our focus we decided to read and observe a special kind of flower, the composite.

"Many plants have their flowers set close together and thus make a mass of color, like the geraniums or the clovers. But there are other plants where there are different kinds of flowers in one head, those at the center doing a certain kind of work for the production of seed, and those around the edges doing another kind of work."

"Can you see that what you call the flower consists of many flowers set together like a beautiful mosaic? Those at the center are called disc flowers; those around the edges ray flowers."
Handbook of Nature Study, page 503

We had a great time studying these flowers and now we are going to be looking closer when we see a new flower to see if we can tell if it is a composite or not.

Here are some of our flowers that we observed.

Close up of a pink gilardia...can you see the anthers?


Yellow gilardias



Tickseed or corepesis


Pin cushion flowers where you can really see the flower parts


Pink cosmos, first one of the season


Close up of the different kinds of flowers making up the composite. Can you see the disc flowers and the ray flowers?

My son's nature journal entry.


We then put the flowers in our press. I am planning on making a flower calendar to make a record of flowers blooming in our yard for each month of the year. This will be a beautiful way to document our flower study throughout the year by pressing some flowers blooming in each month, pressing them, and then affixing them to card stock with the month neatly labeled on each page. I will share our first month's page when these are ready to be added.


Another great week in our garden. My son and I both learned something new and enjoyed our time outdoors with a focus and purpose.