The control of floral organ identity has received much attention since the first homeotic genes were isolated five years ago. The homeotic factors may be subject to a bewildering variety of control mechanisms including spatial and temporal transcriptional regulation, autoregulation, mutual protein stabilization, specific heterodimerization, post‐transcriptional modification and interaction with accessory factors. Now another level of complexity has been added by the recent discovery that the ‘B function factors’ depend on each other for nuclear localization(1) and can act non‐cell‐autonomously in (...) a polar fashion(2). (shrink)