Flowers

Fact about flowers

• The world’s tallest flower is the 2.5 meters Titan arum that grows in the tropical jungles of Sumatra.
• Titan arum is shaped so that files are trapped in a chamber at the bottom.
• The world’s biggest flower is Rafflesia that grows in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra. It is 1m in diameter and weighs up to 11kg.
• Rafflesia is a parasite and has no leaves, roots or stems.
• Rafflesia and Titan arum both smell like rotting meat to attract the insects that pollinate them.
• The world’s smallest flower is wolffia – the duckweed of Australia. This is a floating water plant less than 0.6 mm across. It can only be seen clearly under magnifying glass.
• The biggest flower head is that of puya raimondi bromeliad of Bolivia which can he up to 2.5 m across and 10m tall and have 8,000 individual blooms.
• Puya Raimondi takes 150 years to grow its first flower, and then dies.
• Two Australia orchids bloom underground. No one knows how these flowers pollinate.
• Stapelia flowers not only smell like rotting meat to attract the flies that pollinate them but they also look like it (all pinky-brown and wrinkled).

Dandelions and daises are beautiful flowers. The world `dandelion’ comes from the French deutde lion, meaning lion’s tooth because the leaves of dandelion look like lion’s sharp teeth.

The word `daisy’ comes from the old English words `day’s eye’ because like an eye it blooms open in the day and closes at night.

Main point

Rafflesia was `discovered’ by British explorer John Arnold in 1818 and he named it after the famous British colonialist Stamford raffles.