The World of Plants

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can – there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did. - Sarah Caldwell

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. - Ralph W. Sockman

A peek into the world of plants. Trivia, and fun facts about plants, courtesy of Facebook pages ‘Colours of Nature’, ‘Ancestral Stories’, ‘Weird Facts’, ‘Unbelievable Facts’, ‘Today I Learned’, ‘Science and Facts’, ‘Crazy Creatures’, ‘The Knowledge Factory’, ‘The Study Secrets’ etc… However, I do not know if they are true. Some of them sound really incredible.

Beyond storage, aloe opens its pores at night to limit water loss and stabilizes that gel with sugars that protect its cells in extreme heat. A self contained survival system, refined for dry worlds. – A Facebook post by ‘Strangest Facts’

The ghost orchid lives rootless on tree bark, absorbing moisture from humid air deep in swamp forests. At night it blooms to attract a giant sphinx moth, then fades by morning, a reminder that rarity often survives quietly. – A Facebook post by ‘Strangest Facts’

A mulberry is not made from just one flower. Many tiny flowers grow close together in a cluster on the tree. Instead of each flower making its own separate fruit, they join together as they grow.

Each little flower makes a very small fruit with a seed inside. As these small fruits develop, they press together and fuse. From the outside it looks like one single berry, but up close you can see the many tiny parts that make it up, and each bump hides a seed.

This way of forming fruit is what makes mulberries special. They are soft and sweet like other berries, but they are really a group of many small fruits acting as one. That is why when you pick a mulberry and pull it apart, you can sometimes see the tiny pieces that came from different flowers. – A Facebook post by ‘Amazing World’

That artichoke on your plate is a flower waiting to bloom. You are eating a blossom paused just before it turns violet and wild. But the detail most people miss is what happens if you let it keep going.

An artichoke is the immature bud of a thistle in the sunflower family, cut before it can open. Left in the field, it swells and splits into a crown of electric purple filaments, sometimes six inches across, drawing bees instead of butter.

The tender heart we prize would toughen into a fibrous core. The tight leaves we peel back would flare outward, no longer layered for us but for pollinators.

For centuries around the Mediterranean, growers harvested them early on purpose. Flavor depends on interruption. Every plate holds a flower stopped mid becoming. Beauty, sometimes, is brightest right before it is allowed to unfold. – A Facebook post by ‘Strangest Facts’

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