A pistillate flower is a female flower: it has a pistil (ovary, style, stigmas) and no functional stamens. In cannabis each one is tiny, a single ovary in a cupped perigonal bract with two protruding stigmas. They form in clusters at nodes and pack densely at shoot tips into colas.
In practice
Unpollinated female flowers are what drug-type growers harvest. When they are kept seedless (sinsemilla), the plant keeps producing new flowers and resin for weeks rather than diverting resources to seed. One stray pollen source can seed a room, so growers remove males and intersex plants early.
Spotting them: a pistillate pre-flower shows a teardrop bract with one or two white stigmas at a node, usually from the fourth to sixth node up, behind the stipule.
Don't confuse with
- Staminate flower: the male flower with anthers and pollen.
- Bud: a cluster of many pistillate flowers, not a single flower.
- Intersex flower: a pistillate plant producing some staminate flowers or anthers.
The female reproductive organ of a flower (ovary, style and stigmas); in cannabis growers loosely call the visible white stigmas "pistils".The sticky, hair-like tip of the female pistil that catches pollen; each cannabis female flower has two, white when fresh and darkening with age.In cannabis, the small leaf-like sheath (perigonal bract) that wraps each female flower's ovary and carries the densest capitate-stalked trichomes.The zone of dividing cells at the very tip of a shoot (or root) that produces new leaves, nodes and stem; removing it is what topping does.Sinsemilla (sensi) is seedless cannabis flower from unpollinated female plants; the word is Spanish for "without seed".In cannabis growing, a plant (usually female) that develops both pistillate and staminate flowers or anthers; botanists call it intersex or monoecious expression.The first individual flowers that form at stem nodes during late vegetative growth, letting a grower tell male from female before full flowering.A male flower that carries stamens (anthers on filaments) and no functional pistil; in cannabis, five drooping sepals around five pollen-shedding anthers.Having male and female flowers on separate individual plants; drug-type cannabis is naturally dioecious with an XY sex-chromosome system.
