Category Botany

The forests of the world give us wood. Wood is used to make many things. The strong, beautiful wood of such trees as beech, oak, mahogany, teak, and walnut is used in building and to make fine furniture, musical instruments, and woodcarvings. Wood from pine, spruce, and cedar is used to make everything from houses and furniture to pencils.

Much of the wood harvested in the world is used in paper. Without paper, we’d have no print books, no cardboard, and no newspapers. Most paper is made from wood pulp. It takes the timber of thousands of trees to make the paper for just one edition of a large daily newspaper.

Wise foresters are careful to plant trees to replace those they cut down, but it’s important that people reuse and recycle as much paper as they can. Saving our waste paper could save a tree from the axe!

Baseball Bats and Hockey Sticks

Houses, tables, chairs, and floors, Rowboats, pencils, desks, and doors, Baseball bats and hockey sticks, Boxes for magicians’ tricks. Each and every one of these is made of wood that comes from trees.

Pants give us many of the products used to make clothing. Your favourite old sweatshirt may be made from soft cotton. The strong, waterproof soles of your shoes are probably made of rubber.

Cotton comes from the seed pods of a plant. When the pods are ripe, they look like fluffy balls. The fluff can be twisted into thread and then woven into cloth.

Flax and hemp plants have stringy fibres in their stalks. The stalks are dried and scraped, then combed into long strips that can be spun into thread. Flax fibres are woven into a fine cloth called linen. Hemp makes coarser material that is used to make carpets and rope.

Rubber trees are often grown in large forests called plantations. To get the rubber out of a tree, workers make slanting cuts in the bark. Juice called latex oozes out of the cuts and drips into a container underneath. The latex is taken to a factory and made into rubber.

It’s party time! The table is piled high with drinks and sweets, and all of them have come from plants.

Want some juice? Just about any fruit can be squeezed to make juice. Apricots, peaches, oranges, apples, grapes, guava, and passion fruit, even lemons – all these make delicious drinks. How about a fizzy drink? Cola is flavoured with kola nuts, which grow on a tropical tree.

Chocolate is made with beans from the cacao tree, which grows mainly in Africa. Coconut is the “meat” of the hard-shelled seeds of the coconut palm. Liquorice comes from the dried root of the liquorice plant. Vanilla comes from the fruit of the vanilla orchid.

Picture Credit : Google

It makes good sense to use local materials when you’re building a house. People who live near a forest use wood from the trees growing there. The skilful people with bamboo nearby use bamboo for many building jobs.

Bamboo is really a kind of grass. It grows up to 37 metres high, with a trunk 30 centimeters across. Many farmers in Asia live in bamboo houses and keep their chickens and pigs in bamboo cages. They water their crops with pipes made from hollow bamboo stalks.

Bamboo also helps people make buildings. Strong bamboo rods make excellent lightweight platforms. Bamboo rods covered in concrete make a sturdy framework for buildings. In China, a group called the Dai build houses that stand on stilts out of wood and bamboo.

Water plants called rushes and reeds are also very important building materials in the areas where they grow.

Without plants, life wouldn’t be as tasty. Why? Because many of the flavours, spices, and sweeteners that make food taste good come from plants.

Sugar comes mainly from two plants, sugar beets and sugar cane. Sugar beets grow in most parts of Europe where the climate is quite mild. They are shaped like fat, white carrots. Sugar beets are shredded and cooked in water. The sweet liquid that results is made into sugar.

Maple syrup comes from sugar maple trees, which grow in North America. The sweetness is in the juice, or sap, of the trees. When holes are drilled in the tree, the sap flows out.

Nearly all the spices that make your tongue tingle also come from plants. Peppermint flavour comes from oil made from the leaves of the peppermint plant. Pepper is the dried, ground-up berries of a shrub. Cinnamon is the bark of a tree. Mustard is made from the ground-up seeds of the mustard plant, a little herb with yellow flowers.

Honey comes from plants, too. Bees make it from nectar they collect from flowers.

Fruits are really the seed packages of plants. People find lots of fruits delicious. Birds and other creatures think so, too.

Sometimes we eat the whole fruit, seeds and all, but if the seed is too big or tough, we remove it. It’s easy to eat the seeds of strawberries, bananas, kiwi, and tomato fruits. But people don’t eat the seeds of apples, cherries, peaches, and dates.

When you eat lima beans, peas, or lentils, you eat the seeds of fruits. When you eat green beans or French beans, you eat the whole pod, not just the seeds inside it.

Many flowers aren’t good to eat, but cauliflower and broccoli are delicious before they come into bloom. The flowers of nasturtiums and violets taste good and make salads even prettier!