Africa’s 2000-year-old trees of life are suddenly dying off
In the past decade most of the oldest baobabs, many of them sprouted over two millennia ago, have died unexpectedly and few new ones are sprouting
Harsh: Europe’s cannabis died just as the first farmers arrived
Cannabis – the source of the drug marijuana – virtually disappeared from Europe just as farmers arrived, so they didn’t get the chance to grow it for another 4500 years
Drones plus AI help to spot sick trees and plants in time
Drones fitted with multispectral cameras are scanning forests for beetle attack, and orchards and vineyards for signs of disease before it’s too late
Mistletoe’s cells are broken at a fundamental level
All complex organisms rely on tiny nodules called mitochondria to supply their cells with energy – but mistletoe’s mitochondria don’t work and yet it survives
A fossil may rewrite the story of how plants first lived on land
A plant fossil that lay unnoticed for a century is unexpectedly large for something so old, and it could upend our ideas about the evolution of land plants
Trees may have a ‘heartbeat’ that is so slow we never noticed it
Trees repeatedly move their branches up and down during the night, and this may reflect water being pumped along the branches – just like a human pulse
Plants love carbon dioxide, but too much could be bad for them
Most plants were expected to grow more as CO2 levels rise, but a 20-year experiment suggests that the extra CO2 is somehow stunting plant growth, which could make climate change worse
Most UK plants will flower at once in short ‘condensed spring’
Plants in the UK are set to blaze into flower virtually simultaneously, because flowering has been delayed two weeks by the unusually cold weather
Palm trees have been spotted changing sex for the first time
Four Quindío wax palms in Colombia have changed sex from male to female, which was thought to be impossible for such plants
A weird underground plant has been rediscovered after 151 years
A species of subterranean plant was only seen once, in 1866, and was assumed to be extinct – until researchers stumbled across living specimens in Borneo