08 June 2018

20 Fun Facts About Plants

Plants are fascinating things and there is loads to learn about them. Here is a list of 20 fun facts that we thought you might enjoy!

The very expensive spice, saffron, comes from a type of crocus flower.
The juice from bluebell flowers was used historically to make glue.
Asparagus is a member of the Lily family.
In the 1600s, tulip bulbs in Holland were worth more than gold, which in turn led to a crash of the Dutch economy.
84% of an apple is water, 96% for a cucumber. An earthworm is 80% water.
The word "fruit" is a botanical term, while "vegetable" is a culinary term.
A notch in a tree will stay the same distance from the ground as the tree grows.
Peanuts are NOT nuts but are related to beans and lentils.
Bamboo is the fastest-growing woody plant in the world; it can grow 35 inches in a single day.
Vanilla flavoring comes from the pod of an orchid, Vanilla planifolia. Though the pods are called vanilla beans, they're more closely related to corn than green beans.
Small pockets of air inside cranberries cause them to bounce and float in water.
The first potatoes were cultivated in Peru about 7,000 years ago.
The average strawberry has 200 seeds. It's the only fruit that bears its seeds on the outside.
The tears during cutting an onion are caused by sulphuric acid present in them.
A sunflower looks like one large flower, but each head is composed of hundreds of tiny flowers called florets, which ripen to become the seeds.
Oak trees are struck by lightning more than any other tree.
The smell of freshly-cut grass is actually a plant distress call.
There are over 200,000 identified plant species and the list is growing all the time.
90 percent of the foods humans eat come from just 30 plants.
An average size tree can provide enough wood to make 170,100 pencils.