(in a composite flower head of the daisy family) any of a number of strap-shaped and typically sterile florets that form the ray. In plants such as dandelions the flower head is composed entirely of ray florets.
Compare with disc floret
Example sentencesExamples
- Capitula include on average 17 peripheral sterile ray flowers and 43 central hermaphroditic disc flowers.
- The senescent daisies still retained a few partly shriveled ray flowers.
- Heads on discoid plants have an extra whorl of disc florets instead of ray florets.
- Those outer flowers are called ray flowers - for that petal - while the inner flowers are called disk flowers.
- The daisylike blooms are composed of short disc flowers surrounded by single or multiple rows of petal-like ray flowers.