Plants & Trees Facts for Kids
Fascinating facts about the plant world
The ghost orchid has no leaves and no green colour because it gets all its nutrients from fungi in the soil rather than from sunlight.
The dragon blood tree of Socotra Island has bright red sap and an umbrella-shaped canopy that shades its own roots from the scorching desert sun.
Plants have an internal biological clock that tracks time — they can open and close flowers at specific hours of the day even in constant laboratory light.
Rinorea niccolifera, a plant from the Philippines, absorbs huge amounts of nickel from the soil into its leaves — scientists are studying it to mine metals using plants.
The desert rose (Adenium obesum) is not actually related to true roses; it stores water in a swollen trunk and produces stunning pink flowers in the desert.
The oxygen produced by photosynthesis comes entirely from splitting water molecules apart — each oxygen atom in the air we breathe once belonged to a water molecule.
Mycorrhizal fungal networks can transfer carbon, phosphorus, and water between trees of different species, and mother trees have been shown to send extra resources to their offspring.
Plants can pass on 'memories' of environmental stress to their offspring through epigenetic changes — chemical tags on DNA that alter how genes are expressed without changing the sequence.
Chloroplasts, the structures inside plant cells that carry out photosynthesis, evolved from ancient cyanobacteria that were engulfed by a host cell over a billion years ago.
Unlike animal cells, plant cells are surrounded by a rigid cell wall made of cellulose, which gives plants their structure and allows them to grow upright without a skeleton.