Herself’s Houston Garden

Plants grown in soils low in phosphates grow hairy roots in the search for nutrients. Now scientists have discovered the gene that turns on hairy roots and hope to use it to develop food crops that will grow in poor soils or with less fertilizer.

When crops such as barley and wheat are grown on soils containing small amounts of phosphate it is known that those plants with long hairs on their roots give higher yields than those with short hairs. Similarly, long-haired beans grown on the nutrient-poor tropical soils of Central America do much better than short haired varieties.

Root hairs burrow into the soil like tiny ‘mining machines’ releasing acids and other scouring chemicals that crack open rocky minerals releasing valuable nutrients, such as iron and phosphate, that are necessary for plant growth.

Now, for the first time, scientists have found the mechanism that controls the growth of these specialised nutrient-excavating cells. They discovered that a master regulatory gene called RSL4 acts like a switch; hair cells grow when the gene is turned on and growth stops when it is off. read more

More information:
A basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor controls cell growth and size in root hairs
Discovery of nutrient mining machine in plants

It would seem trees are not as dumb as they first appear. When wasps try to lay eggs from outside the flower with out pollinating the flower, instead of inside the flower while spreading pollen the trees drop the fruit containing the baby wasps to death.

While trees often drop unpollinated flowers, they will often hold onto the galls containing the wasps and provide themselves with a future generation of pollinators.

Figs and fig wasps have evolved to help each other out: Fig wasps lay their eggs inside the fruit where the wasp larvae can safely develop, and in return, the wasps pollinate the figs.

But what happens when a wasp lays its eggs but fails to pollinate the fig?

The trees get even by dropping those figs to the ground, killing the baby wasps inside, reports a Cornell University and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (published online Jan. 13). ( read more read more about tree retaliation )

More information
Abstract
Download the paper (pdf)

This first visit was in winter, our next will be in the summer and I’ll take more garden photos and visit lots of botanical gardens.

Every plant is bonsai’d in Tokyo, not just small potted plants, but 30′ trees and everything in between. No plant is safe.

We made our first visit to Tokyo in the winter, our next visit will be in warmer weather and I’ll be visiting botanical gardens then. But for now here are a few photos from formal gardens about the city.

We were surprised to see so little bamboo. It is usually in patches about 20′x20′ and along the highway but rarely a part of the garden.

Every plant in the garden is bonsai’d. Here we tell people not to mushroom their shrubs or amputate their crapes, yet every plant in every Tokyo garden we saw was heavily pruned.

Along pathways tree branches are forced to grow across and down and supported with ropes and boards.

No plant is left untouched.