It's summer in Santa Cruz and it's impossible to miss all the naked ladies. They're on every street corner. Amaryllis belladonna got it's scandalous name, Naked Ladies, by its pattern of blooming once the leafy part of the plant has died down.

Like all lilies, Naked Ladies have prominent reproductive organs. I'll use my digital microscope to give you a closer look!

A Naked Lady's Boy Parts

The Anther

The pollen laden anthers (the male bits) are set back from the protruding stigma.

A Naked Lady's Girl Parts

The Stigma

The stigma leads deep within the flower to the female bits, the ovary. Inside the ovary there are numerous ovules, each with an unfertilized egg. As you can see from the photo of the stigma, our naked lady has already had sex. The stigma is covered in pollen!

The Ovules

How Naked Ladies have Sex

When a pollen cell lands on the stigma, the process of mitosis begins within the pollen cell. It splits into a generative cell that produces sperm and a tube cell that expands thousands of times the length of the pollen cell reaching all the way along the narrow style to fertilize one of the eggs contained ovule of the flower.

The pollen tube is the tube which travels from the stigma to the ovules is shown as the red line bisecting the floral axis.

I found these ladies hanging out in front of a church.

Hand for scale!