Question: try and intreeg me with plants because i find them boring

Emma Bennett answered on 19 Jun 2011:

I feel your pain, plants are so dull at school when all you do (or at least all I did) was learn about the different parts of a plant and watch some old 1980s retro videos on them. However there is a far more interesting side to plants so I’ll give you a few examples.

There are the classic carnivorous plants that eat insects, plants such as venus fly traps will suddenly slam closed to trap insects when they come into contact with the hairs on the trap. The insects are then slowly digested with plant enzymes – quite a painful death I suspect.

You also get gas plants whose leaves give off a strong aromatic vapour that in hot summers can catch alight and cause a sudden flash of fire across the plant – hence they are also called burning bushes. Never fear though these don’t cause the plant to go up in flames as the vapour burns off quickly.

When you think of antifreeze the first thing that probably springs to mind is car screen wash. Yet some plants have long been producing antifreeze proteins to help them survive sub zero temperatures and take over harsh environments.

Plants can also do battle with each other (allelopathy) by producing chemicals that injure the plants around them so that one plant can take over an area – some fungi are also able to do this sort of chemical warfare as well.

Finally a lot of plants have really poisonous parts, even the seeds of apples contain small amounts of the poison cyanide and eating 4-8 seeds of the caster oil plant which contains the toxin ricin is lethal. In fact ricin was used to assassinate Georgi Markov when he was stabbed with the point of an umbrella that contained a pellet with the ricin toxin in it.

I hope that this has shown you that plants are not quite as boring as they first seem.