Difference Between a Monocot and Dicot Flower

Monocots

• The distinctions that make a flower either a monocot or a dicot are strictly physical. Monocot flowers contain an embryo with a single cotyledon (the part of the plant embryo that becomes the first leaves of the new plant). The "flower parts" (i.e., petals) of monocot flowers always come in multiples of three, and the major veins of monocot plant leaves are parallel. The roots of monocot flowers are adventitious, meaning that they grow sporadically from different parts of the plant's anatomy including stems, branches and leaves.

Dicots

• The embryos of dicot flowers have two cotyledons rather than one, and the flower parts of dicot flowers always occur in multiples of four or five. Roots for dicot flowers are differentiated from adventitious roots in that they all branch out from a central stem rather than occurring randomly throughout the plant anatomy. Major leaf veins are reticulated, meaning they are complex and networked, rather than orderly and parallel as is the case with monocots.

Precautions

• Some of these classifications, which distinguish flower parts in particular, are not 100 percent accurate. Although monocots tend to have flower parts divisible by three and dicots parts divisible by four or five, some monocots and dicots are exceptions to this rule. The same is true of most of the other characteristics discussed; the classification of a flower into one category or the other results from the accumulation of multiple features characteristic of one or the other category.

"Fuzziness"

• The monocot/dicot distinction is useful for classifying flowers, but botanists recognize that the distinctions between the two are often "fuzzy," in the words of Berkley University's Museum of Paleontology (References 1). The "paleoherbs" group of plants, for example, has led to confusion and disagreement among botanists since they tend to display characteristics of both plant categories. Botanists have theorized that the fuzziness is a result of the fact that the two groups of plants probably evolved from a common ancestor.