Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1500/en

As the last of the involucral bracts lower themselves, 100 to 200 individual florets unfold on the widened receptacle — pressed closely together, radiant in golden yellow, a second rosette on a higher level, turned toward the heavens. They open successively from the margin inward toward the centre of the flower head. This head moves in keeping with the course of the sun. In the late afternoon, some of the involucral bracts raise themselves upright again; simultaneously the receptacle sinks, so that all the ray-florets stand gathered upward in a single bundle and are once more enclosed bud-like by the bracts. In fine weather this rhythmic opening and closing can repeat itself over several days; in rainy dullness the flower heads remain closed. After the flowering is over, some of the involucral bracts lift themselves one last time. In the seed formation now following, they hold the fullness of the blossoms tightly enclosed. Meanwhile the tubular stem continues to grow upward still, outpacing the grasses and herbs growing up around it. Within this last enclosure, an inversion takes place on the receptacle with respect to seed formation, in the following way: the seed sits with its head in the receptacle, while its opposite pole, where the finely threaded calyx leaves are seated, reaches upward toward the heavens. During seed ripening, a fresh impulse of movement stirs: from the calyx pole of the seed, a slender stalk grows, bearing at its tip the threadlike calyx leaves, the pappus. As it grows upward, these push the withered petals upward out of the involucral bract enclosure. After this longer preparation, the involucral bracts then fold back downward one final time; the receptacle vaults and rounds itself into a sphere, on which — borne on long stalks — the filigree "blowball" appears (Figure 30, p. 409). It is always fully formed in all its individual little umbels, since every seed-fruit has developed within the receptacle. Fully ripe, the seeds release themselves from the receptacle and sail off one by one on the next gust of wind.