Bonsai Tree

The National Arboretum & Penjing Museum has dozens of bonsai on exhibit. Many of the bonsai are over 100 years old. This bonsai picture shows three trees in the central courtyard.This close-up bonsai picture shows how they are trained through the use of wires, trimming and other methods to create complex miniature trees with striking appearances.

Poinsettia

The flower most associated with the Christmas Holidays is the Poinsettia.Poinsettias are native to the Americas, originally from the Pacific Coast of Central Mexico and Guatemala.Named after the first U.S. envoy to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett, who first introduced it to the United States in 1825. The Poinsettia is also called Flor de Noche Buena (Noche Buena is what people of Hispanic descent call Christmas Eve, so the translation would be Bloom or Flower of Good Night or Christmas Eve)May your Christmas Holidays be filled with many, many blooms!

Botanical Garden in New York

 The Bronx Botanical Garden, formally known as the New York Botanical Garden, is unquestionably one of the world’s best municipal gardens. Founded in 1891, Bronx Botanical Gardens is also a leading regional education center of horticulture. For a plant lover, this is heaven. For a casual fan of trees and flowers, a trip to New York Botanical Garden Bronx might just be the thing to launch you into the ‘plant lover’ category. Either way, the Garden is so exquisite that it tends to be consistently found on even the savviest New Yorker’s suggested itinerary.

Great tree in Limpopo

This is one great tree in Limpopo, Mozambique. It is unique tree because it is a tree which have many carvings on it. It really presents artwork of the creator of those beautiful carvings. Maybe it is the shame that alive tree was used on that way but many people still thinks that it is beautiful.

Plant Underwater,Coral

What is coral? When you see pictures in National Geographic of huge rock like things in the ocean with fish swimming all around, is that coral? Well, sort of. That is a coral reef.Coral is an animal that belongs to the phylum cnidaria. A phylum is a group that scientists place animals in which share certain characteristics. Cnidarians are radially symmetric, which means that they are the same all the way around, 360 degrees! They are built like sacs with a hole in one end that is surrounded by stinging tentacles. Jellyfish are cnidaria. Now, you are probably thinking, jellyfish don't look anything like what I thought coral was! That's because the most common pictures of coral are colonies called reefs.During the mating season coral polyp release eggs and sperm into the water (picture below) and when an egg and a sperm meet they form a larva known as a planula.

NASA Predicts Non-Green Plants on Other Planets

Kiang and her colleagues calculated what the stellar light would look like at the surface of Earth-like planets whose atmospheric chemistry is consistent with the different types of stars they orbit. By looking at the changes in that light through different atmospheres, researchers identified colors that would be most favorable for photosynthesis on other planets. This new research narrows the range of colors that scientists would expect to see when photosynthesis is occurring on extrasolar planets. Each planet will have different dominant colors for photosynthesis, based on the planet’s atmosphere where the most light reaches the planet’s surface. The dominant photosynthesis might even be in the infrared.

The Interesting Cactuse

When speaking of succulenT plants, we need consider two groups: the CACTUS family, and the remaining SUCCULENTS which belong to more than twenty distinct families. Cactuses are of American origen. The remaining succulents are also found in Africa, Australia and northern Europe.Some 10.000 succulent plant species exist, comprised in 30 families. Of these 10.000 species, 2.000 are in danger of extinction, and many more are threatened in certain regions. The main factor which causes the disappearance of these species is the destruction of their environment, as well as pressure caused by unconscientious collectors.