Why do flowers wilt? Flower wilting enables plants to salvage resources from flowers and re-use these resources for subsequent reproduction

As flowers age, their petals commonly wilt, with changes in colour, loss of turgor and transfer of constituents to other parts of their plant, and such flower wilting may be advantageous to a plant because it allows resources originally allocated to a flower to be resorbed and reused elsewhere with consequent benefits in terms of plant reproduction. Working with a perennial plant species, we directly verified, for the first time, that plants may benefit from salvaging resources from wilting flowers and re-using these resources for subsequent reproduction. However, contrary to expectation, plants did not re-use such resources from wilted flowers for reproduction during the current flowering period, by either the same flowers or other flowers on the same plant. Instead, they used these resources to promote reproduction during subsequent flowering, through resource transfer from wilting flowers to underground corms and roots, which were sources of resources necessary for subsequent floweri..., See Pyke, Ren & Kalman 2023, , # Why do flowers wilt?

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.905qftts6](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.905qftts6)

## Description of the data and file structure

*Experimental protocols*

Experiments were designed to compare plants on which flowers wilted naturally with plants where some or all flowers were manipulated such that they had minimal or no wilting. However, this was achieved differently for the three experimental years.

Experiments were specifically designed to test Hypotheses 1, 2 and 3 in 2019, 2018 and 2020 respectively.

Hypothesis 1: Re-use of salvaged resources from wilted flowers by the same flowers (2019 experiments; Fig. 2 H1).

The 2019 experiments were designed as follows to test hypothesis 1 that resources, salvaged by a plant during a flowering season when its flowers wilt, are reused by the plant during that season for reproduction by the same flowers.

For one group of plants (i.e., R-plants), petals were removed from all flowers when they reached age 6 day, thus pr...