Happy Birthday Andrew!

Andrew's favorite flower is the lily, and as this is his birthday, I thought I'd draw him one.  He loves tiger lilies... orange and loud and happy.  This is a pure white lily with larger, more voluptuous petals and leaves.  The lily plant family is primative, evolutionarily speaking.  It has simple leaves with parallel veining, all arranged opposite one another and the pairs are whorled around the stem.  if you look from the top down the stem, it looks like a spiral staircase, which is a nifty way for each leaf to get its own share of sunlight.

The flower of the lily is monoecious, meaning it has all of the sexual parts needed for pollination to occur.  Technically, it has three petals and three sepals that look alike and are arranged in a laterally symmetrical fashion, so it is called zygomorphic (bet you didn't know you were going to get a plant morphology lecture today!) The female part, the pistil, consists of a long style with a stigma at the end, covered with a sticky substance to catch the pollen.  It sits above the six stamen, the male parts.  On top of each stamen, a pod-shaped anther loaded with pollen is attached in the center, allowing it to rock in the breeze like a see-saw.  (Or spill indellible pollen onto your tablecloth if you forgot to remove it before you put the flowers in the vase!)  Lilies are fragrant, which is why I love to plant them along a walkway in our garden.  They are a welcome burst of lovliness in July, when other flowers start to fade away.  Enjoy, Andrew!  This bud's for you!!