Lettuce in Bloom!

We are all familiar with the lettuce we see and eat in our salads. But how many of us have seen the plant in flower and how the flowers really look like?

My community gardeners left their favourite lettuce plant to flower so as to collect its seeds. As you can see from the picture below, it is one attractive cultivar that has lanceoate leaves that are tinged with red. 

The plant started to send up its terminal flowering stalk some time back, rendering the plant no long harvestable. As the flower stalk grows, you can see the internodes also widen and the plant in the picture below is about 1.2 m tall. I expect it to grow a little taller than that.

The close-up pictures of the flower buds and opened flowers are shown below. As one can see, the opened dainty, yellow flowers of the lettuce resemble daisies. In fact, lettuces are members of the Asteraceae (formerly known as Compositae), which is the daisy family.

Tags: bloom, Lactuca sativa, lettuce