George Francis Atkinson - Botany for High Schools (1910):
Fig. 51. A. cross section of the stem of an oak tree thirty-seven years old, showing the annual rings. rm, the medullary rays; m, the pith (medulla). B, cross section of the stem of a palm tree, showing the scattered bundles.
look y'all Pokémon eeveelutions are great but eevee has nothing on wild mustard
Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”
“Friend”
Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.
Plants don’t wage war
Ever heard of blackberries?
Yes, plants do wage war
Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else.
I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.
It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.
Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.
And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.
This post did not go where I expected it to.
Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.
Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.
Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed.
Can second the comments of Kudzu.
I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.
I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:
See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.
• Cacti are some of the only plants to photosynthesize from their stems. Their needles are really just modified leaves.
• Avocados are only around because people pollinate and disperse them by hand. The large seed is indigestible to small mammals now. It was originally eaten by giant sloths who would poop them out far away from the parent tree so they can grow. This is called an evolutionary anachronism.
• Banana candy does not taste like bananas because it was designed to taste like the Gros Michel banana which was eaten in the pre-1950s. It was wiped out by a fungus called panama disease. Since bananas are asexual all of them are genetically identical making it easy to wipe them all out at once. However fungus is sexual so it evolves more quickly. This means eventually we may lose the modern banana, the Cavendish, to it as well.
• There are actually three different types of photosynthesis: C3, C4, and CAM. Which type is used depends on the aridness of the environment, and are increasingly more efficient as listed.
• Moss is amazing. The fuzzy part of the moss is called the gametophyte stage and it is haploid meaning it has one set of chromosomes like a sperm or an egg cell in humans. If you look closely, sometimes you will what look like little tiny seeds on stems coming out of the main body. This is the sporophyte stage and it’s diploid, or has two sets of chromosomes, like our body cells. Moss is the oldest type of plant.
• You can usually tell what animal pollinates a plant by the color and shape of its flowers. Red flowers are hardly ever pollinated by bees because bees cannot see red well. Butterfly flowers have long deep centers. Bird pollinated plants can bear weight and are wide and open. Bat pollinated plants usually smell strongly and are darkly colored.
• Almost all American native elms and chestnut trees are extinct because of fungi. Asian chestnut and elm have replaced them, because they are resistant to the strains.
• There is a type of fern that has over 1200 chromosomes. For reference, humans have 46.
• If you shine consistent low level red light on a plant it will grow extremely tall, because red light tells the plant it is being shaded by and competing with other plants. If you shine consistent green light on a plant it will not sprout or die (if already sprouted) because plants absorb red and blue light to use. This is also why plants are green, because the unused green light is reflected back out.
TLDR; Plants are frickin cool and should get as much love as our animal friends.
I made the mistake of commenting about the banana candy thing to my dad and he got like weirdly emotional. He misses the old bananas so much.
did you know there are bisexual flowers and they’re perfect
it says so right there in my bio textbook i would never lie to you
perfect (bisexual)
mamawinterwolf you might like this general plant info
Wow! I HONESTLY didnt realize there were names for different features of leaves and plants
Of course it’s Australian.
You always see list of deadliest toxins, but almost never lists of least fun toxins. I mean, a bite from a taipan snake will kill you dead, but in a brisk and orderly fashion that will unfold from “Ow, bugger, what was that” to “x_x” in about an hour.
The reaction to the gympie gympie stinging tree, however, can last for months, during which time there is precious little they can do for you except pump you full of steroids and strap you down to a table with a brace in your mouth so you don’t do yourself serious injury. In the 1960s, British military scientists studied the tree for its potential as a biological weapon.
The research was apparently abandoned, for reasons which have never been released to the public; but if I had to take a guess, I’d look to the example of civilian research scientist Marina Hurley, who spent three years studying the gympie gympie, and was forced to abandon her research when, despite using every manner of precaution, her exposure to the plant’s neurotoxin nevertheless led to hospitalization. The hairs on the plant which carry the toxin, you see, are regularly shed, and become airborne, at which point they can be inhaled and cause severe nosebleeds, asphyxiation, and anaphylactic shock.
One survivor of a brush with a gympie gympie described the stinging persisting for over two years, made worse whenever he took a cold shower.
Writers, here’s an idea. A grim one, but we can always use those, too.
i thought it said there’s a singing tree and my hope was shattered
When Ken Morrish picked this apple off a tree in his garden, he thought a prankster had painted half of it red.
But after inspecting it closely he realised that the remarkable split colours on the fruit were a natural phenomenon. And the bizarre apple turned Mr Morrish into something of a celebrity in his village with scores of neighbours queuing up to take a photograph of it.
Experts say that the odds of finding an apple with such a perfect line between the green and the red are more than 1million to one. [source]
My Biology major boyfriend got a scholarship for excellence in Botany as well as a scholarship for excellence in Biology and Zoology
I asked him if this his possible and all he said was “I don’t know, plants are fucking weird”
