There are more than 700 species of plants that grow in USA and have been identified as dangerous if eaten. Among them are some that are commonly favoured by gardeners: buttercups, daffodils, lily of the valley, sweet peas, oleander etc.
Some farmers in Japan have learned to grow their watermelons into a square shape. They did this to conserve shelf space.
Pollen never deteriorates. It is one of the few natural substances that last indefinitely.
The African baobab tree can have a circumference as large as 100 feet. One such tree in Zimbabwe is so wide that the hollowed-out trunk serves as a shelter at a bus stop, with a capacity to hold as many as 40 people.
Wilow bark, which provides the salicylic acid from which aspirin was originally synthesized, has been used as a pain killer ever since the Greeks discovered its therapeutic power nearly 2,500 years ago.
The oldest living thing in existence is not a giant redwood, but a bristle cone pine in the White Mountains of California, dated to be aged 4,600 years old.
When potatoes first appeared in Europe in the seventeenth century, it was thought that they were disgusting, and they were blamed for starting outbreaks of leprosy and syphilis. As late as 1720 in America, eating potatoes was believed to shorten a person's life.
An acre of trees can remove about 13 tons of dust and gases every year from the surrounding environment.
Oak trees are struck by lightning more often than any other tree. It has been theorized, this is one reason hat the ancient Greeks considered oak trees sacred to Zeus, God of thunder and lighting.
The largest single flower is the Rafflesia or “corpse flower". They are generally three feet in diameter with the record being 42 inches.
The angle between the main nches of a tree and its trunk remains constant in each species - and this same angle is found between the priincipal vein of the tree's leaves and all its subsidiary branching veins.
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