Conifers have both male and female cones. The males cones produce pollen. Conifers are wind-pollinated (they evolved before the pollinators) and that is why the male cones are carried primarily on the lower branches an the female (seed) cones are carried on the higher branches. This reduces the chances of self-pollination. Right now the two most prevalent trees in San Francisco, cypress and juniper, are both near maximum pollen. Many of the pines are already there, too. A lot of people will be sneezing around here!

Conifers don't have showy flowers like angiosperms but they have all of the sexual parts necessary to effect reproduction. And brand new seed cones can be all colors of the rainbow.

Ohhh so the male cones are pretty much the flowers. So male and female cones look the same although they have different functions? Except for yews and junipers whose seeds are encased by a fruit.

Also a specific conifer question that I wanna ask instead of spamming the conifer forum with all my posts. Not sure if you know this specific cultivar but if you do does the green sargent juniper(juniperus chinensis 'green sargent') have both male and female plants even though they are the same cultivar? And it says it fruits, but does it reliably do so? I remember you stating in my past thread that most groundcover junipers barely fruit and that the only reliably fruiting one is juniperus conferta. However, I see the green sargent juniper as a good fruiter according to many of the sites I looked at. I would choose juniperus conferta in my conifer collection as its main fruiter but it is only hardy to zone 6

The cones you're thinking of are the female part. Look for pix of of strobili to see what male cones look like.

tj

Oh wow I'm an idiot. So let me correct myself. The male cones are pretty much invisible or very small and the female cones are the typical pine cones that we speak of. So the juniper berries... I guess the green sargent I was talking about has both female and male parts on one plant. But I usually never see the berries of a juniper nor a yew on just the upper side of the plant so I thought most were either a female or male only. But missouribotanicalgarden states 'pollinated female plants' which means one plant is either a female or male and can't be both?? I don't really get it

Now you need to read what species are monecious and which are dioecious.

tj

Heruga you are asking about basic botany. Google 'conifer botany' or the like and you'll get tons of info.

I don't see any sites that state whether the green Sargent is dioecious or moneicious. Juniperus chinensis the species itself is dioecious but how about the cultivar green Sargent?

Heruga, below are Table Mountain pine male cones that are blooming in mid-spring (some yrs ago). The juvenile female cones are very hard to spot until they start growing as cones:

If the species is dioecious, the cultivars are the same.

The hard-to-answer question is whether a particular cultivar is all male or all female. Grafted cultivars are essentially clones and are all the same sex.

Plant listings can be ambiguous because flowers can mean "those pretty colorful things" or those sexual organs all flowering plants have that botanists desribe. By non-flowering they could just be warning you not to expect pretty things in the spring.