It is easy to know that people are alive They can move speak and do all sorts of things that show they are living breathing and thinking The same is true for animals But what about plants Sometimes the easiest way to know a plant is living is to notice its growth Some plants grow slowly Others can grow quickly enough to see changes almost every day Bamboo trees are among the fastest growing plants on Earth In the right conditions some bamboo trees can grow as much as 35 inches 89 meters in a single day
The Saguaro cactus grows very slowly In its first 10 years of life a single cactus will grow to be less than two inches five centimeters high But they can live to be 200 years old and eventually reach 40 to 60 feet 12 18 meters in height
Plants trees grass or anything that grows from soil are just as alive as people and animals In some ways plants live very differently than us In other ways they live as we do Plants need food they work to reproduce and they can adapt to conditions around them BREAKTHROUGH BOTANIST Though humans have harvested eaten and even used plants as medicine throughout history the science of botany has blossomed in recent centuries In the 1700s Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus helped make sense of the diversity of Earth's plants and animals by classifying all living things based on physical characteristics As a botanist he classified plants based partly on how they reproduced Linnaeus's ideas and research became central to botanical understanding long after he died His work remains important to this day Carl Linnaeus 1707 1778 Scientists use the Greek words Plantae and Animalia to classify things as plants or animals The Kingdom of Plantae includes all known species of plants just as the Kingdom of Animalia includes all known species of animals including human beings
FIELD NOTES KINGDOM PLANTAE Mosses Liverworts Ferns Club Moss Cone Bearing Plants Flowering Plants
