By Andy Winfield
I may be biased, but plants are amazing! They tell us all we need to know, they feed us and can make us feel better in the mind and body, they can clothe us, make us warm and cool us down; they were here a long time before us and they’ll no doubt be here a long time after us. Plants are everywhere with thousands of stories to tell, the planet’s true survivors adapting to everything thrown at them; we could live to be three hundred years old and still discover new and bewildering ways that plants have found to exist. They are the dominant life form on earth making up 83% of all biomass; without them we are nothing, they literally give us the air that we breathe. (more…)
‘Survival of the fittest’ is a phrase used to describe the natural world; the spoils are to be won and the strongest live on. Life is more complicated than this, and there are many lives that endure through building partnerships and being good neighbours. New discoveries are being made all the time about the adaptations that organisms make to survive. Many of these discoveries are in the plant world; our understanding of reciprocal relationships between plants, animals and fungi is growing all the time and perhaps the natural world is more companionable than we originally thought. There are brutal elements, but all the while connections are being made, trades agreed, and reciprocal back scratching develops, aka ecological mutualism.