World’s highest plants discovered growing 6km above sea level

Plants have been found growing at a record-breaking height of 6150 metres above sea level for the first time.

Six species of cushion plants have been discovered clinging to a gravelly south-west-facing patch no bigger than a football pitch on Mount Shukule II in the Ladakh region of India.

This sets a record for vascular plants, although algae and mosses can grow even higher because they are more tolerant to drought and frost.

A team led by Jiri Dolezal, of the Institute of Botany at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Průhonice, endured nausea and extreme fatigue studying how plants respond to warming in a location five days’ journey away from the nearest road.

“We could manage only a couple of hours of work a day,” says Roey Angel, a team member from the University of Vienna in Austria.

But the plants they found were in much better shape, having features that enable them to counteract the long, bitter winters and lack of water. Each was no bigger than a coin, contained a high-sugar antifreeze, and had leaves arranged as rosettes that help them to enfold warmer air.

Their roots were tiny too, but Dolezal was able to make out 20 growth rings in a 1-millimetre root. This implied that one of the plants had been there for two decades, although the others had only been there for a few years.

Climate-driven ascent

Climate change is warming the Himalayas, and these plants are likely to have come from seeds that blew onto land from which a glacier had retreated.

Dolezal says that the average temperature in the short growing season at this spot has risen by around 6 °C in a decade – and he believes that plants will ascend even higher in future.

The crucial factor that limits plant altitude is that they need at least 40 days of frost-free soil each year in which to grow, something that is now probably happening on these and other peaks in the region.

“In the arid Himalayas – mostly Tibet – there are many mountains with vast unglaciated areas available,” says Dolezal. And with longer frost-free periods, this means plenty of new habitat to conquer.

“I’m surprised at the elevation – it’s very high,” says Jan Salick, senior curator at Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis. But she is encouraged that plants may be able to move to higher altitudes than previously thought, and keep up with climate change.

As part of the GLORIA-Himalaya project, she has found alpine plants in Tibetan China moving upwards at 0.06 metres a year, while the temperature band they usually occupy is outpacing them by ascending at 6 metres a year. The fear is that the temperature increase is encouraging the tree line to ascend too, squeezing the alpine plants out.

This discovery by Dolezal’s team confirms that it’s possible for plants to move upwards more quickly, says Salick.

Could FLOWERS help stop burglars? Cleveland Police think so

If you are wanting to protect your home from burglars, then a state-of-the-art alarm is a must,

But Cleveland Police say there is a new weapon in the fight against home invasions - flowers.

Roses, pyracantha and berberis could all be used to stop bandits breaking-in, according to the force, who say the prickly thorns could make burglars think twice.

And with Christmas around the corner, the force claim a festive of holly could even be used to stop intruders snatching presents from under the tree.

“Prickly plants, or defensive planting, is your first line of defence against crime in and around your garden,” says Cleveland Police’s Gerry McBride in a force blog.

“The term ‘defensive planting’ is used to describe the way you can use certain prickly plants, bushes and shrubs to deter burglars.

“Think about using defensive planting around vulnerable areas such as windows, fences, boundary walls and drainpipes.”

Latest figures show that over 2,400 homes were burgled on Teesside last year - an average of over six per day.

But the force say the latest leafy security measure won’t just help keep your home safe - it will also give it a splash of colour in the process.

However it adds: “Defensive planting isn’t meant to replace other security measures such as lighting, locks and alarms, but is intended to complement it.”

Discover plants from around the world in your own garden

British gardens are stuffed with plants collected from far-flung places, so it’s quite possible to have plants from South Africa, China, the US, Australia and Asia all in one border. As such, having a world map on the wall of the garden shed, or in the kitchen, along with some panel pins, is a fun exercise for your grandchildren.

My grandson James, aged eight, was touching my pots of agapanthus the other day when he remarked on the thickness of the petals and the rubbery stems. I explained that agapanthus comes from South Africa, which clocks far more sunshine hours than we do. I explained that thin petals would shrivel up under such strong sunshine, so some South African plants have evolved to have rubbery petals packed with lots of pigment. Never shy away from complex vocabulary. Children’s minds and memories are razor-sharp and I faced the fact long ago that my four may well be brighter than I am!

Kniphofias, crocosmias, nerines, dieramas and gladioli also come from the South African Cape, and many of these enjoy summer rainfall. Some kniphofias are pollinated by hummingbirds in the wild and, if you brush against them, nectar showers over you. I had a few sparrows on mine.

China is another great source of garden plants as it has 30,000 species, about an eighth of the world's known flora. Many magnolias, witch hazels, hydrangeas, azaleas, peonies, camellias and chrysanthemums were collected from China at the beginning of the 20th century. They tend to be primitive because certain areas of China escaped glaciation. Magnolia flowers, for instance, are beetle-pollinated because bees hadn’t yet appeared.

The strange thing is many Chinese plants have North American relatives because, before the continents drifted apart, the two were one land mass – a nice detail to inspire children. The Chinese versions are more showier than the American species in almost every case, but when the Asian and American relatives find themselves planted in the same place they produce fabulous hybrids.

One Chinese plant found in almost every British garden is Buddleja davidii, sometimes called the butterfly bush. It can attract 22 species of British butterfly and produces honey-scented nectar in August, when most larger butterflies are about. Peacocks, red admirals and small tortoiseshells adore it, but you might see painted ladies, too, and these migrants will have arrived on a warm wind from the Continent.

In autumn you’re almost bound to have Michaelmas daisies and these plants have a huge range stretching through North America, through Europe, into Asia with some coming from South Africa. If you’re unsure which is which, look up the plant on the internet, adding “native to” in the search wording.

Asters are daisies, corruptions of “day’s eye”, so they need a bright position. September-flowering New England asters, now called Symphyotrichum novae-angliae after a botanical shuffle, come from North America. They are very easy to grow, and their mainly pink and purple flowers, borne on tall, woody stems, are also highly attractive to butterflies. Other North American plants include echinaceas, heleniums, border phloxes, heliopsis and goldenrod.

Plants from South America play a huge role as summer fades because they’ve evolved in parts of South America close to the equator, where days and nights are evenly balanced in length. However temperatures vary greatly there and nights are far colder than days. Many salvias, all dahlias, many penstemons, alstroemerias, fuchsias, heliotrope, morning glory and cosmos all hail from that part of the world and come into their own later in the year.

If you can, also teach your grandchildren colourful stories about the brave, young plant hunters who went into the unknown to collect all these plants. Most died young – the unfortunate David Douglas (1799 -1834) was gored to death by a bull in Hawaii, and Reginald Farrer (1880-1920) died of pneumonia on the Burmese/Chinese frontier. There were tiger attacks and murders, too.

How Author Charlotte Mendelson Transformed Her Patio Into A Garden Larder

If you are a frustrated enthusiast-in-waiting, with only a tiny growing space, or nothing at all; if other people’s gardens, let alone gardening books, intimidate you; or if your only interest in plants is in eating them, you are not alone. This is my confession: my comically small town garden, a mere six square metres of urban soil and a few pots, is not a scented idyll of rambling roses, or an elegant, if overstyled, space in which to drink prosecco. It is a larder in which I grow more than 100 things to eat, including, in an ordinary year, eight or nine types of tomato; five varieties of kale; three kinds of raspberry, red and gold; various sorrels; globe, Jerusalem and Chinese artichokes; 10 kinds of lettuce and chicory, and another 10 of Asian greens; seven or eight types of climbing bean, mostly Italian; about 50 herbs and a few flowers, all edible. I make salads with 20 or 30 different leaves; and I harvest, sometimes by the teaspoonful, juneberries, wild strawberries, tame strawberries, blackberries, wineberries, blueberries, loganberries, gooseberries, cherries, grapes, rhubarb, apples, figs, quinces and every conceivable currant.

With variable success, and modest yields, this minute area is a wildly uneconomical experiment in extreme allotmenteering – a city jungle, green and bountiful, combining edible cultivation with natural beauty but, sadly, little room to sit. Yes, I do mind that there is no space for a nut tree, or just a couple of small sheep, but, despite this, it is a source of infinite happiness and deep peace. How could it not be? Try this whitecurrant. Look at the way the evening sunlight dapples the bean leaves. Listen to the hum of all those bees. Visitors tend to laugh. It looks completely bonkers, yet I am in love with it.

I didn’t mean to become an edible gardener. One minute, I had acquired a garden full of happy shrubbery and ardent ground cover, easy to tend, a pleasure to look upon; a few months later, I was tearing most of it out and, despite total ignorance, laboriously raising from seed dozens of things I wanted to eat.

Here’s a little of what I’ve learned:

The perils of containers

Around this time of year, what container-grower is not moved almost to tears by her folly? I have more than 70 pots, excluding all the temporary seedling homes, the 10 succulents and house plants holidaying outside, and the 20 containers at the front.

Watering is a delicate process, which non-gardeners fail to understand. “Why,” ask the unwary, “not save yourself some time? Give them a going-over with the hosepipe and let them get on with it? Treat them mean!”

Containers dry out so quickly. Only with a watering can one ensure that the water truly reaches the roots, instead of pooling like quicksilver on the dusty soil surface before trickling over the lip of the container and filling the saucer, convincing the careless locum gardener that the plant has drunk its fill.

Proper, individual watering is like a home visit by a kindly family doctor: is all well? Are there interesting sicknesses: magnesium issues? A problem with boron? How are they in themselves? And so watering even my laughably tiny garden is a slow, but delicious-smelling, process. When I can no longer lug a watering can, I will totter outside with a milk bottle, a mug, a thimble-full. It is a chore, but I could not live without those whiffs of cool mint and spicy tomato leaves. The garden and I are keeping each other alive.

The joy of tomatoes

I love my tomato plants, a little too much. In the infinitely seductive world of vegetables, they have rare power. Merely their names are enough to quicken the pulse: ‘Merveilles des Marchés’, ‘Black Opal’, ‘Harbinger’, ‘Cherokee Purple’, ‘Indigo Beauty’, ‘Moonglow’, ‘Bloody Butcher’. Those of us who are vulnerable to a really good name can be manipulated mercilessly; we’d buy ping-pong balls if the right noun and colour were combined.

Part of the joy of tomato-growing is that one’s work is never done. This is why I prefer the varieties that grow as vines or cordons, not bush tomatoes, the drearily named determinates, which quickly become a thicket of criss-crossing stems. A cordon requires effort, and plenty of it: planting the seedling deeply in its pot to encourage opportunistic roots; staking it gently; hand-pollinating every last flower; pinching out the side shoots. The smell is glorious; the prospect of warm, home-grown fruit, fragrant and magnificently showy-offy, is irresistible.

What to grow when you can’t grow lemons

Lemon balm is almost the perfect plant: fragrant, edible, adaptable, easy to grow. Unfortunately, it is also revolting. Why does no one admit this? There is something unspeakable in its scent: a syrupy sweetness beside the tang, artificial as furniture polish or car sweets. Its taste is worse: like a squirt of bathroom-freshener. It is vile. Treat it as a weed and rip it out.

Lemon thyme: every year you disappoint me. Why do we keep pretending you’ll stick around? You make these promises and I keep trying to please you: more grit, less water, less fuss. It isn’t fuss; it’s love. But, every winter, you leave me. When will I learn?

Lemongrass is easy; you simply shove two unpromising supermarket stalks into a jar of water and wait for roots. It’s magical: the 21st-century sophisticate’s equivalent of cress on kitchen towel. However, all that you produce is a couple of leafy stems that, once you have planted them out, will be less useful than the original stalk; and, much more worrying, they won’t survive the winter. Don’t even try.

Which leaves us with lemon verbena, a reputedly tricky plant. I have been lucky with mine, perhaps because I fleece it thoroughly in winter and for the rest of the year treat it meanly, never transplanting it to a larger pot. The scent is fabulous: a resinous sherbety zest, exactly as one might hope a lemon tree’s bark might taste. Its most obvious glory is as tea. Culinarily, try it whenever you might include lemon zest or thyme..

Earliest Plants Are Responsible For Modern Day Oxygen Levels

While oxygen first appeared in Earth's atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, it took another two billion years to reach the levels we breath in today.

Now a researchers believe they have identified what helped lead to this dramatic increase in oxygen on our planet - moss.

Scientists at the University of Exeter suggest moss-like plants were among the first to colonise the land and triggered oxygen in the atmosphere to increase.

The first plants are thought to have colonised the land from the oceans around 470 million years ago.

These first terrestrial plants were non-vascular plants, known as bryophytes, which include moss.

They say that the emergence of these plants increased the intake of organic carbon into sedimentary rocks – the primary source of atmospheric oxygen.

The scientists calculated that Earth's early plant biosphere could have produced roughly 30 per cent of the modern carbon take up from the atmosphere on land by around 445 million years ago.

This drove up oxygen levels and established a new, stable oxygen cycle.

The researchers estimate that within 50 million years of this, oxygen levels had reached modern levels.

Profesor Tim Lenton, who led the study, said: 'It's exciting to think that without the evolution of the humble moss, none of us would be here today.'

The earliest plants on earth were bryophytes - plants such as moss - which are non-vascular, meaning they do not have vein-like systems to move water and minerals around the plant.

The researchers used computer simulations to estimate when oxygen levels reached that of modern day.