World of trees and plants

Plant wonders 

'Poor plants, they cannot even walk ,' people generally say.

But are plants really so poor and helpless?  Definitely not.many plants are blessed with survival skills and surpass those of even the cleverest of animals. 

For instance, there are plants that are  adept at hunting ,a d others that have ways to defend themselves. The pitcher plant is a well know plant that hunts insects by trapping them in its leaves.

Look at the all-too-familiar,'touch me not'.Touch it, a d the plants drops, and drops,and withdraws like a shy child .in fact ,it is cleverly defending itself by playing dead!

There are plants that are good at Camouflage and adaptation too,like living stone and baobab.

Top food plants 

Every year the people of world eat more than 3 billion tonnes of cereals,

950 million tonnes of vegetables and 700 million tonnes of fruit. 

These figures come from the food and  agriculture organization of United nations, or FAO,which is based in Rome . The aim of the FAO is to help people around the world to grow more food and eat a better diet.

Farmers working on fields.

Crop	yearly production (tonnes)
Sugar cane	1,293,220,050
Maize	692,034,184
Wheat	626,466,585
Rice	614,654,895
Potatoes	321,974,152

●List of top 5 cropping plants 

American plants:-

As many as 30 percent of world's most useful plants originally came from North,central, and south America. Early European explorers discovered the plants while on their travels and took them back home to grow.this was not always easy. pineapples were so difficult and expensive to cultivate in Europe that they become  a sym6of wealth- pineapple carvings can be seen on the gates of many grand houses.

Here some plants that originally came from the America:-

●avocado      ● chilli pepper     ●peanut       ●beans       cash chew       ● corn  

●pumpkin     ● tobacco              ● potato              ●sunflower       ●rubber etc.

☆☆☆Important crops 

 These are the most important crops grown for uses other than food-

Crop	uses	yearly production (tonnes)
Cotton	clothing,household items	66,665,616
Rubber	tyres,shoes,balls	9,126,159
Tobacco	cigarettes, cigar	6,382,000

Dangerous  plants  :-

Not all plants are safe or even touch. Nettles sting and other plants, such as euphorbia and poison ivy , may blister your skin .many quite common plants ,including buttercup,are poisonous if eaten because they contain chemicals called phytotoxins.stranglely ,some plants poisonous( such as curate and strychnine) are used in minute quantities to cure illness. 

Plants which you should take or not.

● potatoes are safe to eat when cooked, but the stems and leaves of the plants contain a poison called solanine.if potatoes turn green, they may also contain solanine.

● Ricin is extracted from the seeds of castor oil plant and is more poisonous than cyanide or snake venom. Even minute doses of ricin can be fatal.

● Opium is extracted from the juice of a poppy and contains morphine.small quantities of both are used legally as pain-relieving medicines and legally as drugs.

● The death cap is highly poisonous mushrooms. It is responsible for almost 90 percent of deaths from eating fungi. The poison causes severe diarrhea and vomiting. 

● Curare is extracted from the bark of certain trees and is used by south tribes to tip their poison arrows when they go hunting. 

● Deadly nightshade is also known as belladonna.it contains a poison called atropine. Less than ten milligrams could kill a child.

● Nicorine is a yellow oily liquid found in tobacco. About 50 milligrams of nicotine would kill an adult within minutes. 

●The leaves of the purple foxglove contain digitalis and eating just a few can be fatal. Digitalis is used in tiny doses to treat people suffering from heart disease. 

● Strychine comes from the kochla tree,which grows In Myanmar and india.it is one of the most deadly poison known.

World forests 

Forests cover 29.6 percent of earth's land area and almost a quarter of these are in Russia. There are three main types of forest which grow in particular climates in different parts of the world. 

⊙ Tropical forest or rainforest grow near the equator where it is always hot and wet. Here temperature are about 20 to 25 degrees Celsius and there is  more than 200cm of rain a year.

⊙ Temperate forest grows in places that have hot summers and cold winters. The summers can be as hot ad 30 degree cels5 and winter as cold as -30 degree Celsius. Average rainfall is about 75 to 150 cm a year.

Speciality of these trees are they loose their leaves in autumn and grow new in spring.

⊙Boreal or taiga forest grow in Russia, Canada and elsewhere in the far north . Winters are long and very cold.there is a rain fall of 40 to 100 cm a year,but most fall as snow. The speciality of these trees are evergreen conifer. These are come producing trees with needle like leaves.

Record-breaking plants 

1. Tallest tree :- the world's tallest tree is called the Stratosphere Giant.it grows in Rockefeller forest, Humboldt Redwoods state park,California. At 112.32m this redwood is almost three times the height of the Statue of Liberty in New York. Most of Britain tallest trees are in Scotland:a Douglas for growing in Tayside ,Scotland is the record-holder at 64.5m.

2.Biggest living things :- The General Sherman giant sequoia in sequoia National park,California,  USA ,is the world's largest living things. It is 83.8m tall and measures 2.53m round its mighty trunk. Including its judge root system, the trees weights about 2,000 tonnes.

3.Largest and smelliest flowers:-  The flowers of the rafflesia, or stinking corpse lily measures almost 1m across and weighs 11kg . It is also one of the world's smallest flower, with an odour like rotting flesh.the smell attracts flies,which pollinate the plant.

4. Oldest tree :- The bristlecone pines in California and Nevada ,USA are almost          5,000 years old and were long believed to be the oldest trees. 

Tree	Age in year
Japanese cedar	7,200
Baobab	5,150
Yew	5,000

5. The world's smallest flowering plant is the watermeal or wolffia globosa. Found all over the planet, this bright green oval plant is about the size of a grain of rice! Wolffia is the smallest genus of the aquatic plants known as duckweeds which are part of the family Lemnacea. 

6.The largest seed in the world is coco de mar, the seed of a palm tree . It can reach about 12 inches(30 cm) long,and weight up to 40 pou6(18kg) . The coco de mer , a giant ,dark brown seed ,has been protected by the government of Seychelles because of its rarity.