novi-la:

Apparently y’all love plants as much as I do so here are some more facts!

•All of the mass of a tree comes from the air. As plants take in carbon dioxide they convert it into solid structures called cellulose to make their cell walls. Before the 1600s people thought plants grew by eating soil.

• The first animal to be cloned, Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996 but botanists began cloning plants in the 1950s.

•Pollen is not actually plant sperm!!!! Pollen is the microspore stage of angiosperms. It is actually a fully formed microscopic plant. Seriously, look it up if you don’t believe me.

•Leaves are technically plant organs.

•Juniper berries are not true berries. They are not made like fruits are, because fruits come from angiosperms (flowering plants) and junipers are a type of gymnosperm (conifers and cycads). Juniper berries are really just fleshy cones.

•Plants need soil for a special reason. Unlike just plain old dirt, soil contains something called soil solution which has positively charged ions the the plant needs to grow. This is why areas that are over-farmed become dead zones. All the cations have been absorbed.

•The little dots on the undersides of true ferns are called sori and they produce spores.

•If you cut off the top of a plant it will never grow any taller. You have removed the shoot apical meristem. By removing it you have inhibited the release of a certain hormone that will then cause the plant to grow side to side and become more bushy. This technique is how bush sculpting is possible.

•Any plant that does not produce wood is referred to as an herbaceous plant.

•Carnivorous plants like Venus flytrap and pitcher plants only catch insects for minerals. They still get all of their energy from photosynthesis but they need the bugs for things like nitrogen. This is because they are usually native to areas with low nutrient, acidic soils.

• All plants make spores but only some plants make seeds.

TLDR; plants are still cool as hell