This section of Plant Finder is about (herbaceous) plants with white flowers.  It relies heavily on characteristics of the inflorescences of the included set of plants.  You will need to understand how I'm using the term "inflorescence" in this resource.

In the most general sense, the term "inflorescence" can be understood to mean "the place on a plant where the flowers are located".  For relatively small plants, with but a few flowers, that definition will be adequate.  However, for larger plants, especially those with many branches or many flowers, we'll need a more robust definition.

Different botanical authors use different definitions of the term "inflorescence".  For example, Gleason and Cronquist (1991) use the following:

    "A flower cluster of a plant; the arrangement of the flowers on the axis."

What did they mean by "axis"?  Haines (2011) provides a clue in his defintion:

    [An inflorescence is an] "arrangement of flowers on a stem or branch."

So, a stem or branch can serve as an "axis".  Thus, larger, more branched plants with lots of flowers, may potentially have multiple inflorescences.  The particular characteristics of each inflorescence may vary from species to species.

There are numerous technical terms used to distinguish between types of inflorescences, such as, raceme, spike, corymb, panicle, umbel and cyme.  In this key we won't require users to be familiar with any of those terms.  We will  describe inflorescences in non-technical English words.  Let's look at some examples, below.

Examples of Inflorescences
(See brief definitions below.)