Talk:Aster (genus)

calling all american botanists
is new england aster Symphyotrichum novae-angliae, or does it belong to the Aster genus? Wikipedia has it down as belonging aster on the genus page and symphyotrichum on the species page. SuperRuss

Fibonacci Number
The article now says, "One notable thing about this flower is that its number of petals is a Fibonacci Number." There are numerous Internet sources for asters having 21 petals, but these sources by and large are hyping Fibonacci numbers and are not botanically expert. Of course, this sentence is problematic because an aster "flower" is not a flower at all; it is a composite flower head, and the 21 petals counts only the ray flowers.

If it is true that all asters have 21 ray flowers, this article should say so, rather than referring erroneously to petals, ambiguously to fibonacci numbers (which could be larger or smaller than 21), and using non-encyclopedic fibo-hype language. Just provide the facts and let the reader decide if it's notable. Also, according to, at least one species of aster has 16 petals, but the aster pictured there might not be a true Aster species. (That web page also suffers by confusing lily and other monocot sepals as petals.) Anomalocaris (talk) 05:38, 19 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Just count ray flowers in our own little collection of photos. Actual numbers vary from 15-30, even if you take the most restricted sense of Aster.  If anyone had convinced a print source to print the Fibonacci claim, it's worth mentioning for the purpose of laughing at it, in an encyclopedic way of course. :-) Stan (talk) 13:02, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Someone has made a large change to the taxonomy without supporting information
Several reputable taxonomic web sites, for instance, http://www.tropicos.org/ of the Missouri Botanical Garden, list several hundred species that can be found worldwide. This page is obviously in error in several places and is based on a local point of view from the British Isles. As it stands it is wrong on the meaning and use of the word petals. Ray flowers are not petals. They are flowers with their own individual petals, so the discussion of how many "ray petals" each has is wrong. A better botainst than me needs to revert or edit this page so it makes sense. Avram Primack (talk) 16:49, 11 November 2016 (UTC)