fructification

Etymology

noun

1. (botany) The act of forming or producing fruit; the act of fructifying, or rendering productive of fruit; fecundation.
   In nature, the wild hop is usually shadowed during its growing period by bushes and trees, and it is only those aboveground parts which are intensively illuminated which pass into fructification period. 2012, V. Rybacek, Hop Production, page 104
   Lucuma salicifolia (canistal) and Micropholis mexicana (wild apricot) are the most infested fruit species. They have a very short fructification period. 2013, Martin Aluja, Fruit Flies: Biology and Management, page 384
   Studying the duration of the flowering-fructification period among interspecific first-generation back-cross progenies of African species showed that this trait is positively correlated (r=0.78) with 100-seed weight and caffeine content. 2014, Victor R. Preedy, Coffee in Health and Disease Prevention, page 43
2. (botany) The collective organs by which a plant produces its fruit, or seeds, or reproductive spores.
   The fructification is liable to become very convex in age. 1824, Robert Kaye Greville, Flora Edinensis: Or, A Description of Plants Growing Near Edinburgh, page 332
   The essence of the fructification consists in the flower and the fruit. 1836, William Paul Crillon Barton, Elements of Botany, page 89
   Postheterotopic transformations played a great role in the evolution of fructifications. The formation of specialized seed-like sporophylls in the Lepidocarpaceae, of strobilar fructifications in the Noeggerathiales, of various capsules and other seed-bearing organs of many gymnosperms belong here. 2012, Sergei Meyen, Fundamentals of Palaeobotany, page 380