The Floral Clock

Raising Students’ Interest in Botany

Abstract

Botany and its basics are hardly interesting for most biology students. We here describe an approved highly activating first session of a lecture series on botany. To raise students’ interest, an original problem-solving environment is constructed connecting fundamental botanical knowledge about leaf and flower mor-phology, wind and animal pollination with chronobiology, evolution, and zoology. Carl Linnaeus was said to know the exact day time by looking at his floral clock composed of plants with different flower opening and closing times. A provided introductory talk briefly explains the molecular background of circadian clocks in plants and animals (chronobiology; cp. Nobel Prize 2017). Working in groups, the students then assist an imaginary scholar of Carl Linnaeus in selecting novel plants for the floral clock. Thereby they gain knowledge on plant and flower morphology, the different types of pollination, the co-evolutionary aspects of flower opening and closing times, and they learn why wind pollinated plants are not suitable for floral clocks.