I know very little about cypresses, although they often dangle under my nose because I think this evergreen hardy gymnosperm has too slow a pace of life and must be simple in structure, and there is nothing to look at.
Yesterday evening in a park I saw a lot of fruit-covered cypresses - probably preconceived, I naturally thought it was arborvitae, and I was a little interested, so I picked a few and looked at them casually. Who knows, this look brought me into a new world.
Looking at its fruit, the first thing I think of is the golden horn king and the silver horn king in "Journey to the West", there are several "horns" on the fruit, to be precise, called "horn thorns", generally 6, the middle 4 are opposite each other, one on each side, it looks like the hood of two kings, which is very funny.
But if you know what its female flowers look like, you know how they came about, and it's not surprising. It's just that its size spore leaf bulb is very small, and it doesn't pay much attention when it opens - this has its own reasons, there are no bright flowers to attract attention, and of course it does not attract the attention of insects - in fact, people don't need it at all!
It is a dioecious plant , with yellow , oval flowers , about 2 mm long , composed of alternating pairs of small sporangia , each of which has 3 pollen sacs , in which the small spore mother cells undergo meiosis to produce many pollen grains without air sacs. The reason it is said above that they do not need insects to pollinate is that they have a large amount of pollen, and wind can do it.
The female flowers are 3-6 mm long, and from the front, they look like multiple regular quadrangular sets stacked together, light pink with a slight powder blue, and a pink floating on the branches from a distance, which is very beautiful. The bulbous has 4 pairs of "petals".
By this time its cones had grown, oval, about 2 cm long, blue-green, and covered with white powder. Because I have observed them less, or because they are not mature now, and the scales do not crack, I can't see how many scales there are. But according to reports, its bead scales and bracts are completely healed, consisting of only 4 pairs of intertwined pairs of bead scales, and only the 2 pairs of pearl scales in the middle give birth to 1-2 upright ovules each.
If so, then it has 2-4 seeds in one cone, and I split 2 cones, one with 10 seeds and the other with 8 seeds. The seeds are wingless and vary in shape, some rounded, some pointed, some angular.
Isn't this Cypress? Is it cypress? But cypress seeds should have narrow wings on both sides! Cypress? It is also winged. Didn't you observe carefully? Wings not pronounced? Haven't grown yet?
This time the observation got into big trouble. I felt like I was standing at the door of another world, just peeking in, and I was blinded by the scene inside, and it seemed that I had to observe for a long time and with multiple characteristics.