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Plants Trivia

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The leaves of the Victorian water lily are sometimes over six feet in diameter.

Orchids are grown from seed so small that it would take thirty thousand to weigh as much as one grain of wheat.

At last count there were about 226,000 trees in New York's Central Park.

The Curly Redwood Lodge is one of northern California’s most unique lodges. It was built from one curly redwood tree that produced 57,000 board feet of lumber. The tree - cut down in 1952 - was 18 feet 2 inches at the trunk. Curly redwood is unique because of the curly grain of the wood, unlike typical straight grained redwood.

The Mexican Jumping Bean is not a bean. It is actually a thin-shelled section of a seed capsule containing the larva of a small gray moth called the jumping bean moth (Laspeyresia saltitans).

The average ear of corn has eight-hundred kernels arranged in sixteen rows.

Trees do not have life expectancies like humans. Some in California are believed to be four-thousand years old or more. How can trees live so long? The simple answer is that they're not as complex as people. So, as long as conditions are right, trees continue to live and grow, until something interrupts it.

In ancient religions, the Norsemen considered the mistletoe a baleful plant that caused the death of Baldur, the shining god of youth.

Carrageenan is a common ingredient in ice cream and toothpaste. Carrageenan is seaweed. A purple, edible seaweed, also known as Irish moss, that's found along the coasts of Northern Europe and North America. It's used as a suspending agent in foods, pharmaceuticals and liquids, as a clarifying agent for beverages, and in controlling crystal growth in frozen confections.

A single coffee tree yields only one pound of roasted, ground coffee annually.

Bamboo can grow up to three feet in a 24 hour period.

Kudzu is not indigenous to the South, but in that climate it can grow up to six inches a day.

The shape of plant collenchyma cells and the shape of the bubbles in beer foam are the same - they are orthotetrachidecahedrons.

American colonists discovered that superior candles could be made from the fruit of a squat bush growing in the sand dunes along the New England seashore. The small, grayish bayberry was picked, crushed, and boiled. It had to be skimmed several times before the pale, nearly transparent, green fat was sufficiently refined. Bayberry candles were highly prized, because so much labor and so many berries were needed to make just one candle.

Oak trees do not have acorns until they are fifty years old or older.

A person standing under an oak tree is 16 more times liable to be hit by lightning than if he had taken refuge beneath a beech tree. The oak tree has vertical roots which provide a more direct route to ground water.

The partridge berry is a botanical Siamese twin. Each berry develops from 2 flowers.

The giant sequoia, which produces millions of seeds, can take 175 to 200 years to flower. No other organism takes this long to mature sexually.

There are an estimated 285,000 species of flowering plants on Earth compared to 148,000 for all other plants. Flowering plants are very important because they provide food for herbivores - plant-eating animals - and for humans.

Leaves of the Sumatra breadfruit tree are notched when they first form, yet have no indentations when the leaves mature.

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