Fun Facts About Plants

• An average tree can provide enough wood to make 170,100 pencils.
• 85% of plant life is found in the ocean.
• Brazil was named after a tree, the same tree a brazil nut comes from.
• The trees and plant life in the amazon rainforest produce half of the worlds oxygen.
• Caffeine serves the purpose of a pesticide in a coffee plant.
• Peaches, pears, apricots, apples and strawberries are all members of the rose family
• Your eyes water when chopping onions because onions contain sulfuric acid and give it off when chopped.
• Strawberries have an average of 200 seeds per fruit and they are the only fruit to have seeds on the outside.
• Leaving the skin on potatoes while cooking is healthier as all the vitamins are in the skin.
• 2000 different plants are used by humans in cooking.
• Bamboo is the fastest growing woody plant, it can grow up to 45 inches in a single day.
• Cabbage has 91% water content.
• Banana is an Arabic word that means fingers.
• ginkgo biloba is the oldest living tree species and it dates back to 250 million years ago.
• The word pineapple comes from an explorer who thought they looked like pinecones but yet had the inner flesh of an apple.
• If you eat a lot of onions it will make you sleepy as they act as a sedative.
• A cucumber is a fruit.
• There are over 300,000 different species of plant and the number is growing all the time.
• During the 1600s tulips were so vulnerable in Holland that they were worth more than gold and they caused the crash of the Dutch economy.
• The baobab tree, found in Africa, can store between 1000 and 120,000 litres of water in its swollen trunk.
• Oak trees only start to produce acorns after they are 50 years old.