Are berries on dogwoods signs that it is a female or male?

Question

what about hollies as well?

how can you tell if it is female or male and what happens to the pollen from the flowers on dogwoods?

and why does, for example, the berries on dogwoods produce flowers and not on hollies?

what other plants are there that produce berries?

why and how so?

thanks for your answers!

Answer 1

Berries are fruits that are ripened ovaries - so they may be female.  They may also be a hermaphrodite (monecious).   Many plants have both male and female s*x parts in the flower.

Answer 2

never eat off a hollie  tree they r poisonous!!!! and trees dont have boys and girls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 3

Berries or fruit grow from an ovary. The flower could have been single sexed, an imperfect flower that had only a female pistil with an ovary. Otherwise it could contain both male stamens and female pistils and be a perfect flower. Either flower type can produce a berry (or other type of fruit).

http://tomclothier.hort.net/seedsav1.htm...

Imperfect flowers of both sexes on one plant is monoecious.

Holly is dioecious so each plant bears only one s*x of imperfect flower. This is why a female holly plant bears fruit but another, a male plant, does not.

Most dogwoods have perfect flowers so each flower is capable of producing a fruit. The flowers cross fertilize mostly by bees and hover flies that are bee-like.

http://zipcodezoo.com/Key/Plantae/Cornus...

http://books.google.com/books?id=xDIXAAA...

Berries are one type of fruit. The fruit is fleshy with one to many seeds embedded in the pulp. Papaya, grape, tomato and persimmon are berries.

http://waynesword.palomar.edu/fruitid1.h...

Some persimmons come from imperfect flowers on monoecious plants. Tomatoes come from perfect flowers.

Berries mostly come from flowers that have their petals below the ovary. This is the hypogynous or superior ovary.

Dogwood's ovaries are usually inferior with the petals above the ovary and their fruit is classed as a drupe not a berry. That is a technicality for botanists but a drupe is a fleshy single seeded fruit. The seed is in a hard shell inside the fleshy part of the fruit. Cherries, almonds, dates & apricots are drupes. Note in the almond the seed is eaten not the fleshy outer husk or the seed's shell but in cherries the fleshy part is eaten not the seed or its shell.

http://www.4to40.com/encyclopedia/index....

http://ohioline.osu.edu/b700/b700_60.htm...

Answer 4

There is no such thing as a female or male tree. It's a tree. If you want to look at it in terms of "female versus male parts," the pollen is kinda like the male, and the stigma is like the female... plants reproduce through pollenation.

And hollies are not flowering plants. Not all plants produce flowers. It's all biology. Just like not all animals have fur or feathers or gills or whatever.