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I don’t know about you guys, but I’m terrible at gardening. That’s why these crochet succulent gardens seem like such a great option. If you know someone who wants a garden but kills plants at an record-breaking rate, these might make a great Valentine’s Day gift.
Why do we take a parasitic weed, one that is rather difficult to gather, and hang it in the house so people can kiss underneath? That’s a rather weird tradition when you think abut it. Smithsonian tells several old tales of why we do this, but the real story of how mistletoe evolved from sandalwood into what it is now is the more interesting tale.
Before there were forests, wispy plants fell on each other in their struggle to reach the sun, like clumsy teenagers unsure of their growing bodies. Then one plant evolved a simple woody stem. It could grow taller than the other plants, and it stole light from them. It poisoned them with shade. Wars ensued that have lasted hundreds of millions of years. Trees of many kinds arose and struggled with each other to be taller. Any species that does not participate in battle loses out in the darkness of the understory—any species except a few. Those in the clan of the sandalwood evolved a way out of the darkness. They survived by stealing from the trees what they had spent their tall stems fighting for.
Sandalwood discovered deceit. Its roots kissed the roots of trees and slipped inside them to steal. But sandalwood still needed to grow up a little and put out a few green leaves to have enough sugar to thrive. And then came mistletoes. Mistletoe is a common name for several independent lineages descended from sandalwood. Like their ancestors, mistletoe species sink their roots into trees. Unlike those ancestors, they do so in the sky.
The story continues to explain how mistletoe developed its way of reproducing in the treetops. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Darwin Bell)
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I love gardening, but I’m not very good at it, which is why I absolutely adore these cute graveyard plant markers. After all, this way you can leave them up after you manage to kill off your poor plants with your not-so-green thumb.
While plants normally have pretty colors in order to attract bugs and other pollinators, one type of plant has evolved to attract bats using sound. I wonder what’s on its playlist?
The Marcgravia evenia plant relies on bats to pollinate its flowers. But given that their target animals rely on echolocation rather than eyesight, these plants have evolved leaves that are attractive audibly rather than visually. The plant’s leaves are uniquely dish-shaped, with almost hemispherical concave curves. When the bats go out flying, the leaves return an echo that’s louder and broader than other plants, making them easier for the bats to detect — and halving the time it takes to find the foliage.
We often post about endangered animals, but plants can go extinct as well. Plant species’ fortunes are affected by the actions of humans and other animals. Consider the strange case of the plant pictured here known as Cabbage on a Stick:
Cabbage on a stick is pretty much what it sounds like: a tuft of leaves that looks like a head of cabbage sitting on top of a thick stick. It’s also known as alula. In the wild, this plant is only found on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and without the work of botanists, it would be extinct. Because the only insect that could pollinate the cabbage on a stick, a type of hawk moth, doesn’t exist anymore, the plant species can only reproduce if humans hand-pollinate it. Botanists repelled down cliffs to reach the existing alula, pollinate it, and bring some back with them to grow in nurseries.
Other plants are endangered because of over harvesting, environmental encroachment, or even poaching. Link
Who says you can’t go on a nature hike just because you’re in a big city? There’s plenty of edible plants growing right there in the streets of Washington, DC!
During two expeditions on Friday, adventurous eaters, amateur botanists, and a handful of curious locals descended on the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of the Nation’s Capital in search of edible plants and wild foods with the renowned forager, ‘Wild Man’ Steve Brill. Our tour, co-hosted by Roadside Food Projects, Atlas Obscura, and Think Local First D.C., covered all of one block. But the number of foods we found, many of which were weeds you’d walk by without a second glance, didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the available bounty growing between the city’s streets.
Read about the safari and the things they found at Atlas Obscura. Link
(Image credit: Dallas Lillich)
Plants and herbs play a big part in the magic of Harry Potter. The students of Hogwarts encounter plants that scream, pulsate, spew poison, and most importantly, become ingredients in magic potions. What’s more is that many of those fantastic plants are based on real plants, or at least real legends of plants. Garden Design gives us the lowdown on the fictional and the actual botanical specimens mentioned in the series. For example, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we meet a plant that grabs people with its tendrils, intending to eat them!
Carnivorous trees have popped up now and again in various superstitious texts, including one outrageous tall tale invented by a 19th-century German explorer named Carl Liche who claimed to have seen an eight-foot-tall plant with long hairy tendrils pick up a woman—supposedly belonging to what was later deemed a fictional Malagasy tribe—and devour her whole. Liche’s story, which was written up as a non-fiction travel account in the South Australian Register, was later found to be completely false.
An entire list of plants from the series are examined in this article. Link -Thanks, Claire!
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I can’t keep a full-size garden alive, but maybe I’d do better with something on a smaller scale. That’s why I love Another Studio for Design’s Matchbox Gardens. Kind of a modern take on the Chia Pet, Matchbox Gardens use cress seed, an easy-to-grow seed that will germinate year-round. Bonus: you can eat the plant if you really want to.
The same company makes PostCarden, which is just what it sounds like: a cute little mailable garden. You probably can’t send them if you’re outside of the EU, so those of us on the outskirts will just have to be jealous.
Link via Flavorwire
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Baubotanik, or botanic architecture is the art and science of creating structures out of growing plants. A program at the University of Stuttgart in Germany explores the possibilities of this new architecture.
The architects begin with stabilizing elements—iron rings, polyester bands, steel grids—and environmentally-appropriate plants that are designed to grow around the armature, becoming stronger at structurally-critical junctures. “Plants have learned to carry heavy loads,” says Ferdinand Ludwig, the team’s biologist and botanist. “We want to explore what is possible when trees are re-thought as building support structures.” After a period of natural growth, the reinforcing elements can be removed, and the structure is comprised entirely of plant elements. By leveraging the “constructive intelligence” of organic forms, Baubotanik architects have designed a pedestrian bridge, a bird-watching house, and a willow pavilion.
Read more about these projects at Garden Design. Link -Thanks, Claire!
Who knew invasive plant species could be so gorgeous? Artist Nicole Dextras scoured her backyard (and her neighbors’) for wearable weeds to comment on environmental issues in the fashion industry, such as the need for sustainable materials. This prom dress was made from Yucca plants found in her neighbor’s backyard. Dextras said she was stunned to find that her neighbor found the plants to be a nuisance.
Nicole’s ice typography is pretty amazing too.
In this crazy world of ours, I’m always surprised how so many animals and plant species interact with one another. Sometimes two things that seem to have no connection are actually directly dependent on one another. When I recently learned that beetles, bees and beets have more in common than just a few letters in their name, I was eager to share what I learned with you guys.
Image via Thomas G. Moertel [Wikipedia]
Beetles are one of the most common types of animals in the world. There are already 350,000 known species, but scientists believe there could be up to 8 million more. New beetle species are discovered at an amazing rate of about one per hour. With so many different types of beetles, it’s hardly surprising there are around 750,000 trillion beetles on earth!
The secret to the beetle’s success is its ability to adapt to almost any environment. They can fly, swim and burrow and different species can survive on anything from tobacco to bonemeal to carpet to strychnine to fiber insulators on cables. The also survive in all types of habitats. One species, the zonocopris gibbicolis survives exclusively on the feces of land snails, living in the best possible place to get that meal –inside the snail’s shell.
As if their diets and living quarters weren’t weird enough, some beetles also have seriously strange breeding habits. The flour beetle (seen above) has sperm that attaches to the members of other beetles that breed with the same female. The sperm has a long shelf life and can then go on to fertilize the eggs of other female beetles. In fact, the female flour beetle has a one in eight chance of being fertilized by a male she never even encountered before.
Image via ©Entomart [Wikipedia]
The blister beetle spreads its larvae with the help of digger bees (pictured above) in what is called a honeytrap. The larvae cling together and form the shape of a female digger bee while emitting bee pheromones. A male digger bee will then approach the trap and attempt to mate with it, giving the larvae a chance to cling onto his chest hairs and hitch a ride to an actual mate. When they get the chance, the larvae then grab on to the female bee and catch a ride to the inside of the hive where they can feed on young bees and honey.
Don’t think for a second that bees are always the innocent victims of beetles though. The stingless bee (pictured below) takes revenge on invading beetles not by striking them down, but by mummifying their bodies in large amounts of resin, mud and wax. The beetle then slowly suffocates before shriveling up like a mummy corpse.
Image via Muhammad Mahdi Karim [Wikipedia]
Bees are fascinating creatures aside from their fighting skills. Outside of humans, bees have the most sophisticated communication systems in the animal kingdom. They can tell each other exactly how to get to a food source and how good the food is using a series of different movements. This method of communication is known as the “waggle dance.” Humans can actually translate the waggle dance and scientists can actually track down a specific flower that one bee mentions to another while under observation.
more …
David Dietle wrote a highly entertaining post on Cracked about the 10 Creepy Plants That Shouldn’t Exist. The list starts off with a bang with this one:
#10. Bleeding Tooth Fungus
The bleeding tooth fungus looks kind of like a wad of chewing gum that leaks blood like a rejected prop from The Shining.
They’re also called the strawberries and cream, the red-juice tooth, and the devil’s tooth. Whoever is in charge of naming scary bullshit
seems really insistent that this thing looks like a tooth, while mostly skirting over the fact that it freaking sweats blood.Oh, and they are listed as "inedible," which implies that someone attempted to eat one at some point. On the other hand, the bloodlike substance has anticoagulant and antibacterial properties. It’s nature’s next penicillin! All you have to do is lick it. Go ahead.
Read the entire list here: Link (some text NSFW)
What if you could train plants for national security? A biologist at Colorado State University working with the Department of Defense is doing just that. Genetic engineering is making plants react to threats they never encountered in nature -for human benefit.
Picture this at an airport, perhaps in as soon as four years: A terrorist rolls through the sliding doors of a terminal with a bomb packed into his luggage (or his underwear). All of a sudden, the leafy, verdant gardenscape ringing the gates goes white as a sheet. That’s the proteins inside the plants telling authorities that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the guy’s arsenal.
It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. “Plants can’t run and hide,” says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. “If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.”
That would be the “receptor” proteins in its DNA, which respond naturally to threatening stimuli. If a bug chews on a leaf, for instance, the plant releases a series of chemical signals called terpenoids — “a cavalry call,” Medford says, that thickens the leaf cuticle in defense.
So far, plants have been produced that react to the presence of TNT, but other factors, such as light and movement, interfere with the process. Medford thinks a working plant is still three or four years away. Link -via Fortean Times
We don’t think anyone is going to disagree if we say that animals are incredibly cool. Some can see things the human eye could never perceive, others can hear stuff we don’t notice and a few can smell more details about someone than we could glean from their biography. However there are some animals that simply stand out as incredible examples of intelligence, skill or simply great mojo; here are just a few of the most intense animal and plant species that exist in the worl, like the killer acacia tree.
According to a professor at Pretoria University, the Acacia trees emit ethylene into the air whenever antelopes start grazing on their leaves. This travels up to 50 yards, warning other trees that herbivores are in the area. Once the alarm signal is given, the trees start producing leaf tannin in quantities lethal to the antelopes.
The professor studying this phenomenon discovered it as he was looking into the death of around 3000 South African antelopes.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Wired has a gallery of twelve trees from all over the world that have outlived everything around them. The oldest started life at least 80,000 years ago, but may be much older! The tree shown is the Llangernyw Yew in Wales, which is only three to four thousand years old, but is one of the prettiest trees in the collection. Link
Previously at Neatorama: 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World
Both Christmas and National Poinsettia Day (December 12) are coming up soon, which brings up some interesting questions you may never have considered before. For example, why is a flower indigenous to Mexico commonly recognized as an international symbol of Christmas? Or why is it so darn hard to keep your poinsettias alive and blooming once you’ve bought them at the store? You may have never thought too hard about the most popular potted plant in America, but here’s your chance to learn about these fascinating blossoms.
Most people consider the bright red (or occasionally pale green, white, orange, cream, pink or marbled) areas on the plants to be the blooms, but in reality, these are just groupings of colored leaves called bracts. The actual flowers are those tiny little buds inside of the bracts (seen above) and these are called cyathias.
While we’re at it, most people think of poinsettias as red flowers, but as mentioned above, they can come in all the colors listed above. Still, over 74% of Americans prefer their poinsettias red, while 8% prefer white and 6% prefer pink.
Image Via Martin Heigan [Flickr]
In Aztec times though, it was called “Cuetlaxochitl,” which means skin flower. In Chile and the Andes, it was known as the “Crown of the Andes.” According to legend, King Montezuma would have the flowers carried up to Mexico City because the flowers would not grow in such a high altitude.
Later on, German botanist Wilenow gave the plant its Latin name, Euphorbia pulcherrima, meaning “very beautiful.” Soon after, it was introduced into the U.S. in 1828 by the first U.S. Minister to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett. Years later, historian and horticulturalist William Prescott was asked to give the plant a new name. Having just written a book about Mexican history, he recalled Poinsett’s role in bringing the flowers into America. Prescott named the plant in Poinsett’s honor. In modern Egypt, they still call the plant “Bent El Consul,” meaning “the consul’s daughter” after Mr. Poinsett.
In Spain, the flower is known as “flor de Pascua” or Easter flower. In Mexico and Guatemala, it is commonly called “Noche Buena” or “Christmas’ Eve.”
Speaking of Christmas, it seems rather strange that these New World plants would become synonymous with a holiday celebrating the birth of a Middle Eastern carpenter. Still, they are in fact the most popular holiday plant around, representing over 85% of all potted plant sales in the holiday season.
The reasons go all the way back to the 16th century, where a Mexican legend began spreading about a young girl who couldn’t afford a gift for Jesus’ birthday. She was said to be told by an angel to gather weeds from the roadside and place them in front of the church altar. Soon after, crimson blossoms sprouted from the weeds and became poinsettias. Starting in the 17th century, Franciscan friars in Mexico began to include the plants in the Christmas celebrations.
Image Via Southern Pixel [Flickr]
Fast forward into America during the sixties and this Mexican tradition started spreading across the U.S. thanks to Paul Ecke Jr. This young man was a marketing genius who started sending television networks free poinsettias for display on air between Thanksgiving and Christmas. He also appeared on programs like “The Tonight Show” and Bob Hope’s Christmas specials to help promote the plant. His efforts were highly successful and largely responsible for the association of poinsettias with Christmas outside of Mexico.
Lest you think Paul was simply an overly enthusiastic supporter of the flower, his intentions were mostly monetary. Paul was an heir of the Ecke family, owners of a virtual monopoly on our modern day idea of poinsettia flowers.
His German immigrant grandfather, Albert Ecke, started selling the plants from street stands after 1900. Paul Ecke the first, Albert’s son, developed a grafting method that resulted in a fuller, more compact plant than the wild plants (seen to the left). He additionally discovered a phytoplasma infection to the plant would induce it to produce far more flowers than its natural, weed-like cousin. The family held the secret to these techniques up until the 1990’s, giving them a monopoly on the poinsettia market up to that point.
In the nineties, a researcher discovered the Ecke’s method and published it, allowing for competitors to the company. These days, many companies in Latin America sell the flowers all over the world, but the Ecke’s family (who now exclusively uses farms outside the U.S.) still controls about 50% of the worldwide market.
Image Via Jiggs Images [Flickr]
In 1919, a completely unfounded story began to circulate that a two year-old child died after she ate a poinsettia leaf. Researchers who looked into the story found that it is all hearsay and about as truthful as the razors in candy apple stories that circulate around Halloween. Ohio State University researchers found that a 50 pound child would have to eat 500 bracts to even get a sore tummy. Despite this, the rumor continues to circulate that poinsettias are poisonous and should not be kept around pets or children.
On the other hand, the sap from poinsettias can cause temporary blindness when introduced directly in the eye and some people with latex allergies will have an allergic reaction to the plants. So the only people who need to be wary of the plants are those that have a latex allergy or anyone with a habit of putting things in their eyes for no reason.
Image Via distopiandreamgirl [Flickr]
If you’ve ever bought poinsettias during the holiday season, you may have noticed just how finicky these beautiful plants can be. Even if you live in an area with a warmer climate that is suitable for the tropical buds, you still may not be able to get your plants to reflower the way they did when you bought them.
The reason for this is encoded in the plant’s genes. In order to produce the vibrant, thick blooms the plant is known for, the plant needs to have two months of completely dark nights in the autumn. Even minor exposure to houselights can hamper flower production. If you really want your plants to reflower, you need to cover the plant with a light-proof bag between 5 pm and 8 am starting early October and stopping when the bracts begin to show colors –usually around mid-December. To make gardening the plant even more complex, you also have to be sure the nighttime temperatures are below 75 degrees Fahrenheit, but also not too cold. Failure to keep the plant in the right temperature can also result in decay or lack of flowers.
Personally, I love gardening and I love poinsettias, but the effort involved with trying to keep them reflowering is just way too much for me. Have any of you had better luck?
Image Via Property#1 [Flickr]
Every other day, we get to hear about some new solar powered creation. Here are 13 amazing solar concepts that draw inspiration from plants. After all, plants are Mother Nature’s solar generators. Pictured is the Power Flower by Art Energy Design, which collects wind energy in the petals and solar energy in the leaves!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
One of the most amazing things about plants is their ability to grow through all kinds of obstacles. When trees manage to do so, the spectacle is even more amazing because it is on such a grand scale. There are even more cool ones when you follow the link.
Charles Darwin was a lifelong fan of flowers, but was unable to figure out how they evolved. There were fossils of flowering plants going back 66-100 million years, which didn’t help much because flowers evolved much earlier. Recently, however, scientists are turning to DNA analysis of contemporary plants to decode where they came from. They are also finding older fossils than ever before, as far back as 136 million years ago. Paleobotanist James A. Doyle says the fossil record is the only thing that will bring together the many theories of flower evolution.
If you could travel back to 130 million years ago, you might not be impressed with the earliest flowers. “They didn’t look like they were going anywhere,” Dr. Doyle said.
Those early flowers were small and rare, living in the shadows of far more successful nonflowering plants. It took many millions of years for flowers to hit their stride. Around 120 million years ago, a new branch of flowers evolved that came to dominate many forests and explode in diversity. That lineage includes 99 percent of all species of flowering plants on Earth today, ranging from magnolias to dandelions to pumpkins. That explosion in diversity also produced the burst of flower fossils that so puzzled Darwin.
Genetic research is providing answers to how plants can switch on genes that control how different plants parts grow, and to use sexual reproduction to increase genetic diversity. Link
Charles Darwin was fascinated with the Venus Flytrap and other carnivorous plants. How did such a thing arise through natural selection? Botanists Don Waller and Thomas Gibson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison believe they have figured it out. The Venus Flytrap descended from an earlier plant that had sticky leaves that acted as flypaper.
First the ancestral plant must have adapted to move its tentacles and leaves in a particular direction, giving it a greater chance of sticking to and engulfing a passing insect.
Next it sped up how quickly it detected prey and tried to respond.
Then the plant would have had to find a way to become selective, so it only tried to trap live prey and not any detritus that landed upon it.
Finally, it must have evolved its tentacles into sensory hairs and teeth that detect and wrap around prey, respectively, while also losing its sticky glands and growing new digestive glands capable of digesting the victim’s corpse.
The adaptations led to the plant’s ability to eat larger insects for more nutrition. Link -via the Presurfer
Peter Cook and Becky Northey started making what they call Pooktre, the shaped plum trees into art and furniture. They started by making trees into a coffee table and a mirror frame. The chair above is one of the greatest. They harvest the trees in the fall and make new art from the stumps, which make new growth.
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Pothos has thousands of followers and gives regular updates. Pothos … is also a plant. A built-in moisture meter relays messages about the plant’s current state in order to remind its owner when it needs watering. This is, one has to admit, a potentially wonderful innovation for those of us with thumbs that are anything but green. Still, Twitter is all the rage these days, sure, but plants Twittering? Has this fad gone too far?
Are you slowly killing your houseplants? Is it because you’re too busy Twittering? THEN HAS THE INTERNET GOT THE SOLUTION FOR YOU!
link -via huffingtonpost
Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), a German artist and professor, captured these ‘art forms in nature’ and used them to instruct his students.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by JKirchartz.
Plants grow too slow to see most of the time – making these videos seem like secret access points to a hidden world that operates at a radically different speed.
For those of you unfamiliar with plants (they’re a lot like pets, only lower maintenance) these 12 (!) time-lapse videos of plants and flowers growing and blooming should adequately acquaint you with their natural majesty. The only downside to plants is that they take a while to grow, but as you’ll see in these videos, it’s a beautiful process, which can be made all the more heart rending when paired with the right music.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
WebUrabanist has compiled a number of posts from their sister site, Webecoist. Together, the posts add up to over 100 super interesting flora and fauna species. I think my favorite is the 10 Strangest Animal Self-Defense Mechinisms.
