No Plant Says “Christmas” Like…. If there’s a plant most associated with Christmas, then, of course, it’s the Christmas tree. What would be in second place? Did you think poinsettia? If so, I suspect most people would agree with you. If you’re looking for a comprehensive website regarding poinsettias (e.g.,…
Turgor Pressure + Plant Cell Wall “Loosening” = Growth. In the previous post, we explored the question of whether or not plants grew at night. The main point of this story was that plant cell turgor pressure is the force that drives plant cell enlargement, and thus plant growth. But…
Do Plants Grow More During The Day Or At Night? A silly question? Whenever I posed this question in my plant science classes, most students thought I was joking. They presumed that plants grow only during the daytime, when the plants are photosynthesizing. If you’re like them, then it may…
Plant Growth = Plant Cell Enlargement. The tallest trees in the world are the California coast redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens), which can grow to over 100 meters (328 feet) tall. That’s higher than a 30-story building. These huge trees can grow so big mainly because their growing cells can enlarge…
Size Does Matter (If You’re Growing Giant Pumpkins) Since it’s that time of year again, here’s an updated post originally published in 2015. Question: What does a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle and the current World Record Giant Pumpkin have in common? Answer: They each weigh about 1 ton (US) or about…
Proprioception: sensing of the posture, shape and relative orientation of body parts Are Plants Self-Aware? No, I’m NOT referring to plant self-awareness as it relates to plant “consciousness”. (If you’re interested in such metaphysical aspects of plant physiology, please see here, for example.) What I’m referring to is the notion…
When No Really Means No (In Plants) When it comes to sexual reproduction, nearly half of all flowering plant species are self-incompatible. That is, the pollen (male parts of flowers) produced by an individual plant is somehow recognized by the plant and rendered ineffectual in self-fertilizing the ovules (female parts…
From A Pumpkin Movie to Jimi Hendrix Yep, the plant news from last month was quite diverse. Let’s start with two movies – one happens over a time scale of months, and the other happens over a time scale of billionths of seconds. “Over the course of five months in…
From Where Potatoes Came From to Where Agriculture Is Going Last November the plant research news ranged from the past history of one of our most important crop plants to the future of agriculture in the 21st century. November is the month of Thanksgiving in the USA, and one common…
From Plant Secrets To Plant Antibiotics What were the five most re-tweeted and favorited plant news stories that I shared in September of last year? Well, here they are, in order of popularity, lowest to highest. “Scientists from the John Innes Centre have pioneered innovative new cell imaging techniques to…