Reaching for the Sun: How Plants Work

Product Description

Green plants are all around us. We are totally dependent on them for food; we cultivate them for our pleasure; and we use them to our advantage in a vast number of ways. This is a lively, nontechnical account of how green plants live, grow and...reach for the sun. It covers everything you need or want to know about plants, including how plants satisfy their nutritional and energy needs, how they direct and promote their growth, development and death, and how they react to the daily and seasonal variations and stresses in their environments. Finally, the author describes how they attract and repel other living organisms and how we exploit them for our own use in food and medicine. From their ability to take energy from sunlight to make their own food to their amazing range of life-sustaining, death-defying strategies, John King explains why plants dominate our planet. This is not just a book for avid gardeners and naturalists. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand why the earth is green.

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Who would have thought that plants behave like squirrels and bears? Yet many do, as we can tell by watching a tree's autumn colors arrive. The yellow and green pigments, carotenoids, are hidden by the green photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll; only when the deciduous plant retrieves this chlorophyll for winter storage do the lighter colors show through. You'll learn about this process, about why one bad apple can spoil a whole barrel, why the Amazon rainforest matters, and myriad other matters of plant life in John King's lively natural history, Reaching for the Sun. The text is technically dense but highly readable.