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How to Tell a Female From a Male Plant
How to Tell a Female From a Male Plant. Plants are not always strictly male or female, which can make determining the sex of your plant a bit confusing. Only dioecious plants develop as solely a male or female plant. Hollies, some palms, spinach, ginkgo and asparagus are examples of dioecious plants. Plants such as corn and pecan may also be...
Plants are not always strictly male or female, which can make determining the sex of your plant a bit confusing. Only dioecious plants develop as solely a male or female plant. Hollies, some palms, spinach, ginkgo and asparagus are examples of dioecious plants. Plants such as corn and pecan may also be monoecious with both male and female flowers on the same plant. You will need to have several flowers to examine to tell if your plant is male or female. You will be looking at the inside parts of the flower, which are easily visible to the naked eye.
Things You'll Need
Flowers
Examine several flowers from the plant. Because a plant may have male and female flowers you will need to examine several to help determine the sex (or sexes) of your plant.
Look for the stamen and anther inside the flower. The anther is a pollen sac that sits on top of a stalk. The entire structure is called the stamen and is the male part of the flower.
Look in the center of the flower for a pistil, the female parts. The pistil is composed of an ovary as the base that is thick and round, a style (the stalk) and the stigma at the top. The stigma collects the pollen that fertilizes the plant.
Determine the sex of your plant by the flower parts you examined. If all of the flowers have the female or male parts only, then you most likely have a plant that is one of those sexes. If a plant's flowers each have the male and female parts or if a plant has some flowers with male parts and some with female parts, then you have a monoecious plant. It is both a male and female plant.
Tips & Warnings
Don’t let squash plants fool you. Squash will grow only male flowers early in the year then will grow both male and female flowers later in the year.
