10 most difficult botany riddles

Lily of the valley increases the strength of heart contraction and is used in the initial stages of heart failure. It is also very toxic at overdose. Death poisoning in children after eating a few berries or drinking water from a vase in which a lily of the valley bouquet was made was described.

The sequoias root system is wide spreading, but shallow. There is no taproot. A mature sequoia's roots can occupy over 1 acre of earth and contain over 90,000 cubic feet of soil.

Throughout his conquests of Asia, Alexander the Great collected many plant and animal specimens for Aristotle’s research. This allowed Aristotle to develop in Athens the first zoo and botanical garden in existence.

Pedanius Dioscorides (40 – 90 AD) was a Greek physician, pharmacologist, botanist, and author of De Materia Medica - a 5-volume Greek encyclopedia about herbal medicine and related medicinal substances (a pharmacopeia), that was widely read for more than 1,500 years. He was employed as a physician in the Roman army.

The mulberry is a significant fiber crop in the history of paper. It was used for papermaking in China by around 100 AD. The paper recipe used by Cai Lun included plant bark fibres, rags and fishing nets. Early paper makers particularly valued Mulberry for producing high quality paper. Washi, a Japanese handcrafted paper, is made with the inner bark, which is pounded and mixed with water to produce a paste, which is dried into sheets.

The saffron crocus is a triploid that is incapable of independent sexual reproduction — all propagation is via manual "divide-and-set" of a starter clone. It may have emerged via plant breeding in late Bronze-Age Crete.

The Tree of Tule is one of a number of old Montezuma cypress trees that grow in Santa Maria del Tule, Mexico. It is one of the oldest and largest in the world and has the widest girth. It has a height of forty meters, a volume of between 700 and 800m3, an estimated weight of 630 tons and a circumference of about forty meters.The trunk is so wide that thirty people with arms extended joining hands are needed to encircle it.

In Brazil, the genus is referred to as Flor de Maio (May flower), reflecting the period in which they flower in the Southern hemisphere.

An archaeophyte is a plant species which is non-native to a geographical region, but which was an introduced species in "ancient" times, rather than being a modern introduction.

Ferula is a genus of about 170 species of flowering plants. Asafoetida, the dried latex from the rhizome of Ferula it is also known as food of the gods or devil's dung. The ferula also shows up in mythological contexts; Prometheus smuggled fire to humanity by hiding it in a ferula as well. In the Middle East, the common name "Lebanese Viagra" refers to the traditional use of the roots of this plant as an alleged aphrodisiac.