🌱 #10 answers: Plant Planet Day

Pando looks like a forest of tens of thousands of trees, but it is really one single tree joined by its roots.

It has about 47,000 stems. This aspen clone in Utah is generally considered the heaviest single tree on Earth.

“A male clonal organism, Pando has an estimated 47,000 stems (ramets) that appear to be individual trees but are genetically identical parts of a single tree connected by a root system that spans 42.8 ha (106 acres).”

A bristlecone pine in the USA known as Methuselah is about 4,800 years old, and it's still alive.

It's credited as the oldest known living non-clonal tree.

“Methuselah is a Great Basin bristlecone pine that is 4,858 years old and has been credited as the oldest known living non-clonal organism on Earth.”

Botanically speaking, the banana is a berry, grown on large tree-like plants of the genus Musa.

To a botanist, a berry is a fleshy fruit grown from a single flower's ovary.

“A banana is an elongated, edible fruit that is botanically a berry produced by several kinds of large treelike herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa.”

When the corpse flower blooms, it gives off a powerful smell of rotting flesh to attract pollinators.

The stink draws in carrion beetles and flesh flies, which carry its pollen.

“Its flower blooms infrequently and only for a short period, and gives off a powerful scent of rotting flesh which attracts pollinators.”

A Venus flytrap can tell prey from raindrops: two trigger hairs must be touched within 20 seconds.

Counting to two stops it wasting energy on raindrops and bits of debris.

“The mechanism is so highly specialized that it can distinguish between living prey and non-prey stimuli, such as falling raindrops; two trigger hairs must be touched in succession within 20 seconds of each other or one hair touched twice in rapid succession, whereupon the lobes of the trap will snap shut, typically in about one-tenth of a second.”

The sandbox tree's seed pods explode when ripe, flinging seeds out at up to 250 km/h.

Its nickname is the 'dynamite tree'.

“The capsules explode when ripe, splitting into segments and launching seeds at 70 m/s (250 km/h; 160 mph).”

Cotton is a soft fibre that grows in a protective case around the seeds of the cotton plant.

The fluffy fibre helps the seeds spread on the wind.

“Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus Gossypium in the mallow family Malvaceae.”

A coffee bean isn't really a bean: it's the seed found inside the fruit of the coffee plant.

The fruit is a small red 'cherry' with two seeds inside.

“A coffee bean is a seed from the Coffea plant and the source for coffee.”

Certain kinds of bamboo can grow 91 centimetres in a single day, almost 4 centimetres an hour.

That's fast enough to notice if you sat and watched it.

“Certain species of bamboo can grow 91 centimeters (36 inches) within a 24-hour period, at a rate of almost 40 millimeters (1+1⁄2 in) an hour (equivalent to 1 mm (0.04 in) every 90 seconds).”

In 2012, scientists grew a living plant from frozen samples that were around 32,000 years old.

Ice Age ground squirrels had stashed the fruit in Siberian burrows that froze solid.

“Frozen samples, estimated via radiocarbon dating to be around 32,000 years old, were discovered in the same area as current living specimens and, in 2012, a team of scientists successfully regenerated a plant from the samples.”