Tepal

From Freepedia

In a general sense, a tepal is any member or segment of the perianth of a flower, such as a petal or sepal. The perianth comprises the two outer, sterile whorls of a flower, although both whorls are not present in all species. The term tepal is usually used when all segments of a perianth are of similar shape and color (that is, undifferentiated).

More specifically, a tepal is a floral part of plants in the Class Magnoliopsida, as for example, in the Family Magnoliaceae and a number of other primitive flowering plants such as the Amborellaceae and Calycanthaceae. It corresponds to the sepals and petals in the flowers of other plants, but unlike these, all tepals are of the same form, not being differentiated into the protective, not insect-attracting sepals that serve to protect the developing bud, and larger, insect-attracting petals.

Merosity

Merosity is a property of whorls of floral perianths that relates how many tepals a whorl of that particular plant has. Types of merosity, according to number of tepals in a perianth whorl, include:

• dimery (2)
• trimery (3)
• tetramery (4)
• pentamery (5)

The nouns for the different types of merosity are formed by an initial prefixed root (i.e. not a prefix, but a word root that composes the word at the beginning) derived from Old Greek (e.g. tetra- for four tepals) and the suffixed root, -mery, which is derived from Greek, meros, meanining "part".