Many species of butterflies eat plant nectar. When these butterflies land on a series of flowers in search of food, they brush their bodies against both male and female floral organs, inadvertently transferring pollen from one flower to another.

Cypress, like all other coniferous trees, is wind pollinated. The tiny male “flowers” are located at the ends of the small branchlets, where the wind can easily pick up and distribute their pollen.

Strictly defined, the fruit of a flowering plant is its mature, swollen ovary. Pollen grains (the male gametes, carried from the anther of one flower to the stigma of another flower by a foraging insect) germinate on the stigma, growing down the style and into an ovule, where they may fertilize the egg within. If fertilized, the ovules develop into seeds, and the receptacle protecting the ovary enlarges to form what we recognize as the flesh of the fruit.

A seed has three main parts. The embryo consists of the cells that will develop into the structures of the adult plant (root, bud, stalk, and leaf). The cotyledons—one in monocots and gymnosperms and two in dicots—are organs of absorption, drawing food from the seed’s storage tissue. In monocots, this tissue is called the endosperm, and in gymnosperms, the megagametophyte. The cotyledons themselves serve as storage tissue in dicots. The seed coat protects all of these structures from predation, injury, and moisture loss.

Firs are coniferous, evergreen trees with needle-like leaves and woody fruit called cones. The modification of the leaves into needle-like structures is thought to increase the surface area for photosynthesis. The cones bear the seeds on their woody scales.

Cones are specialized seed-bearing structures unique to coniferous trees, such as firs, cedars, pines, cypress, and spruces. The seeds develop within the cones. In the pine tree the developmental period may take as long as three years. Shortly after the seeds mature, the protective scales of the cone open up, and the seeds are released.

Most seeds begin to germinate only with the warming days of spring, months after they have fallen to the ground. As the embryo inside expands, the seed cracks and a root emerges to provide the seedling with both stability and nutrients from the soil. While the root continues to grow and branch downward, the embryonic stem sprouts upward. Nourished from this point by the cotyledons, or seed leaves previously folded within the seed coat, the seedling will develop a shoot with adult leaves.

Since green plants are autotrophic, or able to manufacture their own food from water, carbon dioxide, sunlight, and inorganic molecules, they must grow in areas with available sunlight. In response to this need, green plants are phototropic, or able to grow toward a source of light.