The plant is monoecious, producing the staminate (male) flowers in a large feathery panicle at the summit, and the (female) dense spikes of flowers, or " cobs," in the axils of the leaves below, the long pink styles hanging out like a silken tassel.
The flowers, which appear in early summer, are in pendulous, slender yellowish catkins, which bear a number of staminate flowers with a few pistillate flowers at the base.
The staminate contain 8 to 20 stamens which produce an enormous amount of dusty yellow pollen, some of which gets carried by wind to the protruding stigmas of the pistillate flowers.
When only one of those organs is present the flower is unisexual or diclinous, and is either male (staminate), j, or female (pistillate), ?
Mr Wieland's researches have, however, demonstrated the existence in flowers of this type of the remains of a disk at the base of the receptacle, between the receptacle and the surrounding bracts, to which staminate leaves were originally attached.