Last hurrah

The aloe vera in the front room has more or less finished flowering now and I am left wondering whether there are going to be any seeds and what would they look like.

Inspection revealed some very small paired structures which I thought might well be seeds, fertilised or otherwise, marked with an orange spot above right.

With the triffid having been neglected, it seems, for the whole of May. With the last trace being towards the end of April at reference 1. 

I had forgotten all about the helical business mentioned there, but inspection this evening suggests that the arrangements of the florets might well be described as helical, with a divergence angle something close to the golden angle favoured by phyllotaxists, for whom see the handy exposition at reference 2.

Furthermore, the vertical distance between florets decreases steadily as one ascends the inflorescence. It does not seem unreasonable that this last should grow all the way along, not just at the tip, the growing tip as it were, but it is something else to be checked out.

Still working on what the seeds might look like. There might be some useful onward references at reference 3.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/cod-lacey.html.

Reference 2: Phyllotaxis as geometric canalization during plant development - Christophe Godin, Christophe Golé, Stéphane Douady – 2020.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloe_vera.