I Ate Sunshine for Breakfast: A Celebration of Plants Around the World
Part One ALL ABOUT PLANTS Plants are essential to your world Without them no other living thing would be able to survive This book will help you to become more acquainted with your leafy neighbors from how they grow to fossilization and everything in-between With over 400,000 species on our planet to discover let’s find out all about these incredible organisms
WHY DO PLANTS MATTER Every single day and in every single way we use plants From the food we eat and the cars we drive to the medicines we take and the clothes we wear we would not be able to live without plants At this very moment you are holding a book made from plants And not just one plant many plants The pages and covers of this book are made from a mixture of two types of tree birch Betula and pine Pinus The words you are reading are printed with ink made from soybeans Glycine max and linseed flax oil Linum usitatissimum Plants touch almost every aspect of our lives There are about 428,000 species of plants growing on our amazing planet and 34,000 of these have recorded benefits Many people spend years researching plants and their uses This scientific study is called ethnobotany In the pages of this book you’ll learn exactly what plants are how they work and all the ingenious ways you use plants every day Along the way there are plenty of cool plant experiments to try for yourself Soybean 10
Pine Silver birch A NOTE ON PLANT NAMES This book gives both the common and scientific names of plants The scientific name shown in italics below helps us know exactly which plant we’re talking about Its genus name comes first and is like a family name followed by its species name which is like a first name like this Flax Silver birch Betula pendula 11
