Strange But True...I think

In ya face other seeds!  The coconut takes the biscuit when it comes to size.

My lad came out with an interesting fact that the coconut is the largest seed in the world. It never occurred to me, but thinking about it I have never seen a bigger one so it must be true.  Here are some other interesting facts about the horticultural world that we have probably never thought of  that I cobbled together from other websites.  Just a word of caution if you are studying the subject, don’t use any of this article as I cannot vouch for its accuracy!

Tree Facts

• In one day a full-grown oak tree expels 7 tons of water through its leaves.
• Oak trees do not have acorns until they are fifty years old or older.
• An orange tree may bear oranges for more than 100 years. The famous “Constable Tree,” an orange tree brought to France in 1421, lived and bore fruit for 473 years.
• The General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park, California, is the largest tree in the world. It weighs more than 6000 tons.
• The bark of the redwood tree is fireproof. Fires in redwood forests take place inside the trees.
• The banana cannot reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by hand. Furthermore, the banana is not a tree, it is a herb, the largest known of all plants without a woody stem or solid trunk, so it shouldn’t really be in this category.
• Oak trees are struck by lightning more often than any other tree. This, it has been theorised, is one reason that the ancient Greeks considered oak trees sacred to Zeus, God of thunder and lightning.

• The rings of a tree are always farther apart on the tree's southern side. Woodland workers often read tree rings to find the compass points.( During midsummer the leaves of the compass plants invariably point precisely north and south.)

• Cork comes from the bark of trees. Specifically, it is harvested from the cork tree, which takes more than ten years to produce one layer of cork.
• While known as a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer, Leonard da Vinci was the first to record that the number of rings in the cross section of a tree trunk revealed its age. He also discovered that the width between the rings indicated the annual moisture.

Orchids

• Orchids are grown from seed so small that it would take thirty thousand to weigh as much as one grain of wheat.
• The Orchid is named after the male genitalia. Its botanical family name Orchidaceae, means “testicles” in Greek and may derive from an early notion that the orchid possessed aphrodisiac qualities.

Bees and Honey

• A bee could travel 4 million miles (6.5 million km) at 7 mph (11km/h) on the energy it would obtain from 1 gallon (3.785 litres) of nectar.
• Pollen from trees such as hazel and willow is full of protein. It provides essential food for bumblebees early in the spring, before there are many flowers about.
• Honey will not spoil. In fact, honey in Egyptian tombs has been tasted by archaeologists, who found it to be still edible.
• It takes the nectar of about two million flowers to make one pound of honey.

Fruit

• Apples float but pears do not.
• The cucumber is not a vegetable; botanically, it is a fruit, so are the eggplant, the pumpkin, the squash, the tomato, the gherkin, and the okra. Rhubarb, however, is botanically a vegetable, not a fruit.

What are They?

• A peanut is not a nut. It is a legume.
• Bamboo is not a tree. It is forest grass. Bamboo can grow up to three feet in a 24 hour period.
• The onion is a lily, botanically.
• Humans share one third of their DNA with lettuce (and 50% with a banana!)

That’s a Lot

• A garden caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.
• There is an average of 50,000 spiders per acre in green areas.
• It takes 4,000 crocuses to produce a single ounce of Saffron.
• The giant puffball, lycoperdon giganteum, produces 7,000,000,000,000 spores, each of which could grow into a puffball a foot in diameter and collectively cover an area of 280,000 square mile. Fortunately, only one of the spores actually becomes a puffball, and all the others die.

And Finally.....

• When first introduced to Europe, potatoes were blamed for causing syphilis. Both were indigenous to the New World.
• Washing a chicken egg will strip it of natural coatings that keep out bacteria; it will rot very quickly thereafter.
• The nasturtium derives its name from the Latin nasus (“nose”) tortum (“to twist”). The flower's smell is so powerful that to inhale it was considered tantamount to having one's nose tweaked.
• Celery has negative calories! It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.