Surprising Plants
By Aria
How much do you know about plants? You might think you know all about them, but maybe not.
Plants can be used for a lot of things. You can eat them because there are many edible plants on earth! Most of the vegetables we eat comes from around 30 plants. In fact, if you ever want to eat something new, there definitely is food somewhere that you haven’t tried yet.
They are also used in medicines too. It turns out that we use more species of plants for medicine than we eat! A lot of the medicine coming from the US uses rainforest plants, yet only a tiny percent of rainforest plants have been observed for medicine.
You can also use plants to decorate a room, brighten up a garden, or display them. Plants are pretty, they smell good, and they attract animals.
You have to be careful around new plants though. Some species of plants look similar to ones that we eat, but they can be poisonous. For example, Chestnuts are edible, but a similar looking plant named the Horse Chestnut (also known as a Buckeye) is highly toxic. They look very similar because they both are found in hard cases that are covered in spines, and are shiny and brown. However, Horse Chestnuts have 1-2 nuts inside (as shown below), while edible ones have 4. An interesting thing is that Horse Chestnuts aren’t even a species of Chestnut!
Do you know which Chestnut in the picture is edible and which is not?
Do you think that now you know a bit more about plants?
Worldwide Thing
By E. O. Galvez
This worldwide thing has got me shivering
But I pull up the piece of cloth
I had to bring.
There’s no one here
As usual, I fear
In this late spring.