Hi everyone, I'm Claire and I run the brilliant botany blog over on tumblr.
This is the first in a series of botany vlogs that I'll be posting on YouTube hosted by
yours truly and today I'm here to tell you five interesting botany-related facts.
Number 1: Sunflowers are actually made up of hundreds of tiny flowers called florets.
The brownish ones in the center are called disc florets, and the yellow ones around the
edge that we would think are petals, are called ray florets.
Number 2: The tallest redwood, sequoia sempervirens, is Hyperion, a tree in Northern California
that measures 379.3 feet tall.
That's 151.18 meters, for those of you who are in metric.
Number 3: Deadly nightshade, also called belladonna, is toxic because it contains atropine.
When ingested, atropine can cause rapid heart rate, hallucinations and even seizures.
Number 4: Romans actually had greenhouses.
They constructed them making thin sheets of mica and they used hot steam to blow past
flowers to make them bloom out of season.
Number 5: The first star gazer lily was bred by a man named Leslie Woodriff in 1974.
It was special because it faced upwards rather downwards, like all other cultivated lilies
of the time.
Woodriff actually never saw any profits from the breeding of this new flower.
And we don't actually know what two strains of lilies were bred together to create this
new stargazer strain.
And there you have it, five botanical facts that you can break out at your next party.
Which may or may not make you friends, depending on what kind of party you're at.
If you enjoyed this video, press the thumbs up button and press the subscribe button if
you'd like to keep up with future vlogs that I post here.
If you have any plant-related questions, leave them in the comments and I'll do my best to
answer some of them in future videos.