AMAZING PLANT FACTS

The yellow evening primrose opens only at dusk, and so swiftly that it can be seen and heard. The buds sound like popping soap bubbles as they burst.

Seeds of the African baobab tree sprout more easily if they are first eaten by a baboon and passed through his digestive tract. Its digestive juices erode the tough seed coat, permitting water to penetrate more readily.

In a single growing season, 10 small water hyacinths can increase to more than 600,000 plants, and form a mat of thick vegetation an acre in size and weighing 180 tons [163 mt]!

The stems of the blue-eyed grass, a type of wild iris, are not strong enough to support more than one blossom at a time. So one flower blooms each morning, and then dies that night so that another can bloom the next day.

Bamboo can grow three feet [9 dm] in 24 hours.

The ocean contains eighty-five percent of all the plant life in the world.

A typical plant or tree receives about 10 percent of its nutrition from the ground; the rest comes from the atmosphere and sunlight.

The giant water lily, victoria regia, has leaves so large that a small child could sit on it without its sinking. The leaves are eight feet across.

Lichens have been found on bare rocks in Antarctica as close as 264 miles [424.85 km] to the South Pole. No other plant or animal life lives that near to the South Pole.

The dwarf mistletoe in America builds up hydraulic pressure within it, equal to that found in a truck tire! It does this in order to use that water pressure to catapult its seeds out to a distance of almost 50 feet [152 dm] at a speed of close to 60 miles (96.5 km] per hour. The dwarf mistletoe is a water cannon!

Tiny discs of chlorophyll move about within plant cells and adjust for different light and heat conditions. When the sunlight is too strong, the little discs turn edgewise! On an overcast day, they lie as parallel to the sky as they can in order to take in the most light.

Some plants die as soon as they have flowered, while some trees live up to 4,000 years. There is a bamboo plant in the mountains of Jamaica which takes 32 years to mature, and then flowers once and dies.

Puffball and mushroom spores have been found in large amounts 35,000 feet [10,668 m] in the air.

The Mediterranean squirting cucumber uses water pressure to shoot its seeds 40 feet (122 dm] away.