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Did You Know?
Hilda M. Morrill
What may be New England's oldest willow tree is growing in Milton, Mass. Dendrochronology is the science of calculating a tree's age by its rings. "Digweed" was the family name of the longtime gardeners at Highclere Castle, the main filming location for the British television period drama and PBS Masterpiece Theatre all-time favorite,"Downton Abbey." Georgia O'Keeffe's 1938 pastel "A White Camellia" sold for $3.2 million, and her 1927 oil "Autumn Leaf II" for $4.3 million, at a recent Sotheby's American Art Auction. In ancient Egypt, only pharaohs were allowed to eat mushrooms.
In the 1963 movie "The Leopard," which was shot in Sicily starting Burt Lancaster, only real flowers were allowed on all the sets during the entire filming. This was per the orders of Italian director Luchino Visconti, who had fresh flowers shipped in very couple of days from the city of Sanremo, located on the Italian Riviera, as opposed to using locally grown flowers. Water makes up about 90 percent of growing plants, and thus is the lifeblood of our food chain.
The pickle as we know it is thought to have originated in India, where cucumbers were first grown. At the height of the Inca Empire in Machu Picchu, more land was cultivated on their agricultural terraces than is now in all of Peru. Also at that time, corn was considered a royal food.
Golden Pothos is considered to be the #1 indoor plant in North America. It has been estimated that roughly 90% of the flowering plants worldwide require an insect or animal to distribute their pollen in order to set fruit and seed. That includes one-third of all crops grown for people.... ...most of the corn eaten in colonial times was field corn, which was ground into a coarse meal for mush or bread. The first record of sweet corn didn't even show up until 1779. A well-developed fire ant colony can be as deep as 30 feet and spread out some 20 to 50 feet from the mound. At the age of five, golf legend Lee Trevino began working in Texas cotton fields. Each year nearly two billion tons of fertile, irreplaceable topsoil are lost forever to erosion--and it often ends up in our rivers and streams, degrading water quality with fertilizers and pesticides and damaging critical fish and wildlife habitat. In seventh-century China, all gold peonies were the exclusive property of the emperor; citizens were put to death if found in possession of one.
Each individual iris rhizome will produce only one flower stalk during its lifetime. Oak trees are the main source of cork. The shellac that protects furniture is made from lac, a sticky substance that insectssecrete. These inisects gather by the hundreds and thousands on soapberry and acacia trees in Burma and India. The word lac or lakh means hundred thousand in Persian and Hindu.
In North America alone there are over 12,000 species of butterflies and moths. Most moths are also beneficial pollinators; far fewer are harmful.
Poison ivy is a member of the cashew family...
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