Epiphytes

Look closely at a plant in your local park, your garden or even your kitchen, and you’re likely to see some damage. Whether a caterpillar has chewed away part of a leaf or a mealybug is sucking on sap, animals are constantly feeding on plants. Of course, herbivory, or plant predation, is not ideal for a plant’s survival. So plants have evolved many different defense mechanisms to inhibit this threat, including physical and chemical weapons. For example, cactuses arm their bodies with skin-piercing spines. Herbs such as mint, lavender and rosemary produce volatile scent compounds that can help deter herbivores. Other plants resort to bribing personal bodyguards by secreting thick, sweet nectar. Nectar is most commonly associated with flowers, where it is used to entice bees, birds or butterflies to move pollen from one flower to another. But other plants produce different types of nectar glands called extrafloral nectaries. Plants produce these glands to bribe ants...

Coast redwoods – enormous, spectacular trees, some reaching nearly 400 feet, the tallest plants on the planet – thrive mostly in a narrow strip of land in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Most of them grow from southern Oregon down into northern California, snugged up against the rugged Pacific coast. They have grown by slowly responding to moisture and rich alluvial soil over millennia, combined with a genetic payload that pushes them to the upper limits of tree height. They are at risk – down to perhaps 70,000 individuals, falling from at least a half-million trees before humans arrived – but that’s not a new story, for we are all at risk. Redwoods, like all trees, are engineered marvels. People don’t tend to think of natural things as “structures,” leaving that term to stand in for buildings, bridges and dams. But although trees were not built by humans, they didn’t just happen. They have come into their own t...