Plants
- Plants
Bleeding Trees: Microbial suspect named in beech deaths
A microbe related to the one that caused the Irish potato famine may be killing majestic old beech trees in the northeastern United States.
- Plants
Mirror Image: Flowers with opposite styles have a fling
Scientists have discovered a gene that controls whether flowers lean to the left or the right.
- Plants
Trees dim the light on spring flowers
Early spring flowers and the sugar maples they grow under use different alarm clocks to get going in the spring, which can make life hard for the flowers in northern forests.
- Plants
Fringy flowers are hard to dunk
The fringe on the edges of the floating blooms of water snowflake flowers helps protect the important parts from getting drenched in dunkings.
- Plants
Tropical plants grow cool flowers
Tropical plants that position their flowers in the general direction of the sun are keeping the temperature comfortable for pollinators.
- Plants
Petite pollinators: Tree raises its own crop of couriers
A common tropical tree creates farms in its buds, where it raises its own work force of tiny pollinators.
- Plants
Shower power: Raindrops shoot seeds out with a splat
In a seed-dispersal mechanism scientists have never seen before in flowering plants, rain plops into a capsule and makes seeds shoot out the corners.
- Plants
Torn to Ribbons in the Desert
Botanists puzzle over one of Earth's oddest plants: the remarkably scraggly Welwitschia of southwestern Africa.
- Plants
Lichen Lovelies
Should anyone dismiss lichens as so much gray-green crust, send the detractor to the lichen glamour shots in this Web site’s portrait gallery. The lush photography details shapes from goblets to anchors and colors from blue to neon Lycra-pants lemon. Other images illustrate the importance of lichens for other creatures (see the flying squirrel nest) […]
- Plants
The bladderwort: No ruthless microbe killer
A carnivorous plant called a bladderwort may not be a fierce predator at all but a misunderstood mutualist.
- Plants
Dead pipes can still regulate plants’ water
Physiologists say they have demonstrated for the first time that dead xylem cells in plant plumbing can control water speed.
