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Category: Amazing Plants

  • Newly Discovered Coffee Relative Plant Has Heart-Shaped Fruit

    The discovery, announced just before Valentine’s Day, adds to the growing number of known plants within the coffee family (Rubiaceae). The new plant, has been romantically named Coprosma cordicarpa, meaning the Coprosma (a type of flowering plant) with hearts. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Terrifying Tumbleweed Attack

    If you were a plant designer commissioned to mess with farmers, you would probably come up with something like a tumbleweed. When germinating, tumbleweed seedlings outcompete native plants, and suck up enough water to parch neighboring crops. After they drop from their stems, the vagabond husks often rove in packs, clogging irrigation systems, carrying bugs and diseases, and taking up space where cows could be. (Click on title or image for full story. Be sure to watch the video.)

  • Mysterious Marcescence: Why Do Some Deciduous Trees Retain Their Leaves In Winter?

    We do not know whether marcescence provides a competitive benefit to beech and oak, but we do know that these two species are closely related; they are in the same family (beech). In fact, the beech family includes many, get this, evergreen species (live oaks and tanoaks, for example, which do not grow in our region). Marcescence may indeed be helpful to trees living in dry, cold, deer-infested environments. But it may also be simply a sign that beech and oak are evolutionarily delayed, still on their way to becoming fully deciduous from their more evergreen past. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Seeds That Grew Dinosaurs’ Flowers Discovered

    The world may never know if dinosaurs stopped to smell the flowers, but scientists have uncovered a few more clues about the ancient blossoms that grew alongside ankylosaurs and iguanadons. Recently, researchers discovered tiny Cretaceous flower seeds dating back 110 million to 125 million years, the oldest-known seeds of flowering plants. These puny pips offer a glimpse into the biology powering the ancient predecessors of all modern flowers. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Does The “Sensitive Plant” Fart? How Insensitive Is That!

    “OH MY goodness! It smells like someone has broken wind.” So says Rabi Musah of the University at Albany in New York, who has discovered a previously unknown defence mechanism in plants: roots that actively release a nasty smell when they sense the touch of a potential threat. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Everything We Thought About How Trees Get Water To Great Heights Was Wrong

    While the widespread view has been that siphons work because of atmospheric pressure, recent research has shown that cohesion and gravity, and not atmospheric pressure is the driving principle. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Tattooed Botanist Describes (Yet Another) New Plant Species

    The new species is distinguished from several dozen other species of Calathea by the shape of its leaves. In addition, the new species’ one-to-four inflorescences–flower-bearing structures–are produced on a shoot that extends along the ground from an underground stem (rhizome), a very unusual plant character. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • How The Fly Tells The Venus Flytrap “Kill Me Now”

    the Venus flytrap can count the number of times that its victims touch the sensory hairs on its leaves. One touch does nothing. Two closes the trap. Three primes the trap for digestion. And five …triggers the production of digestive enzymes—and more touches mean more enzymes. The plant apportions its digestive efforts according to the struggles of its prey. And the fly, by fighting for its life, tells the plant to start killing it, and how vigorously to do so. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • The Ancient Forests That Couldn’t Die Properly And The Story Of Coal

    This is a story about trees—very, very strange looking trees—and some microbes that failed to show up on time. Their non-appearance happened more than 300 million years ago, and what they didn’t do, or rather what happened because they weren’t there, shapes your life and mine. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Marvel At The Lowly Dandelion’s Chemical Defenses

    Scientists …have now taken a closer look at dandelion latex. The scientists found the highest concentrations of the bitter latex in the roots of dandelions. Dandelions need to protect their roots very fiercely because these are the main storage organs for nutrients which fuel growth early in the spring. (Click on title or image for full story.)