fructification

Noun

1. 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....
   • 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...
   • 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...
2. 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...