Seasonal flowering and evolution: the heritage from Charles Darwin.

To survive, plants optimise their seasonal flowering time and set seed to avoid extremes of the environment including frost, heat and drought. Additionally, pollination may need to be tightly regulated in time so that it coincides with flowering of other individuals and/or with the presence of bird or insect pollinators. It is now clear that plants use seasonal changes in natural light intensity, daylight duration and temperature to achieve reproducible timing of flowering year-in-year-out. In more recent studies, genetic and molecular approaches are beginning to provide a basis for understanding heritability, an essential component of Darwin's concept of evolution.