If you’ve enjoyed learning about the parts of a plant and how they grow, you might also like these facts about plants for kids. We’ve put together ten of our favorite fun facts about plants for kids here:
- Some plants are carnivorous. It means they eat other living things! They gain nutrients from some insects and spiders, e.g., Venus flytraps.
- Some plants have adapted to defend themselves from animals. Plant defenses include stings and poisons.
- 80% of flowering plants are adapted for pollination by animals (mostly insects).
- Honeybees account for 80% of all insect pollination.
- Nearly all chocolate relies on midges pollinating the cocoa plant, which might make them seem slightly less annoying!
- Some plants self-pollinate. They transfer the pollen grains from the anther to the stigma on the same flower. These plants do not need a pollinator, such as an insect, to reproduce. However, only a few plants self-pollinate. Examples include peanuts, orchids, peas, and sunflowers.
- The monvital puzzle tree is from Chile. But, strangely, there are no monvitals in Chile. Instead, the nonvital puzzle tree is home to more than 70 types of insects and slender-billed parakeets.
- One of the most amazing facts about plants – there are over 200,000 different plant species!
- Some plants do not have flowers or seeds, e.g., moss and ferns. Instead, they reproduce by making spores.
- Some trees are deciduous and lose their leaves in the winter, while others are coniferous (or evergreen) and keep their leaves all year round.
- Some plants live underwater – they are called aquatic plants.
- Saffron is a delicate but expensive spice obtained from the crocus flower.
- Glue used to be made from bluebell flower juice.
- A typical tree has enough wood to make 170,100 pencils!
- Bamboo is the world’s fastest-growing woody plant, with a growth rate of 35 inches in a single day. So you could watch it grow!
- Lightning strikes oak trees more frequently than any other tree.
- More than 80,000 edible plants worldwide, but 90% of our foods come from just 30 plants.
- One of the scariest facts about plants – the poison of Oleander plants is strong enough to poison a person who eats the honey made by bees that have digested its nectar.
- The English word ‘banana’ is derived from the Arabic word ‘banan,’ which means “finger” because of its finger-like shape. Therefore, a cluster of bananas is also called a ‘hand.’
- The oceans contain about 85% of all plant life on Earth.
- Asian watermeal (Wolffia globose) is the world’s smallest flowering plant, with a diameter of 0.004–0.008 inches.
- The world’s tallest living plant, the coastal redwood, can grow up to 379 feet tall and is found only in California.
- The color of the carrots was originally purple, not orange. Its new color results from thousands of years of cross-breeding by humans.
- Oak trees can live for 1,000 years, with an average lifespan of 600. Therefore, they are classed as ancient from 400 years onwards.
- Apples float on water because they are 25% air.
- Cranberries also float on water as they have small pockets of air.
- A sunflower is made of hundreds of tiny florets, each of which ripens into a seed.
- Because the elephant grass in Africa is 4.5 meters tall, and even elephants can conceal themselves within it – which is how it got its name!
- The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.
- The swollen baobab tree’s swollen trunk in Africa can store up to 120,000 liters of water.
