Flowers are not on plants just to make them look pretty. They are there as a vital part of a flowering plant’s life cycle. Not all plants have flowers, find out what flowering plants are and how ...
Flowers are a common sight in most New Zealand school grounds. They offer a colourful starting point to teach about plant reproduction and adaptation and offer opportunities to extend into ...
Plants make seeds that can grow into new plants, but if the seeds just fall to the ground under the parent plant, they might not get enough sun, water or nutrients from the soil. Because plants ...
Sexual reproduction is a way of making a new individual by joining two special sex cells, called gametes. In the sexual reproduction of animals and plants, the male and female gametes join to ...
Scientists divide plants into two main groups depending on whether they reproduce by seeds or spores. Plants that reproduce by seeds Seed plants have special structures on them where male and ...
The flowers and fruit of flowering plants come and go as part of their life cycle. Some flowering plants don’t even have stems and leaves all the time. The fruit and vegetables we eat come from ...
The life cycle of ferns is different from other land plants as both the gametophyte and the sporophyte phases are free living. This interactive illustrates the alternation of generations in ...
Not every plant grows from a seed. Some plants, like ferns and mosses, grow from spores. Other plants use asexual vegetative reproduction and grow new plants from rhizomes or tubers. We can also ...
The life cycle of the monarch butterfly. Click on one of titles to find out more about each stage.
Flowering plants need to get pollen from one flower to another, either within a plant for self-pollination or between plants of the same species for cross-pollination to occur. However, pollen ...
Humans have many reasons to grow plants. We use them for food, for building materials, for pleasure and for many other purposes. A plant really just has one reason to grow – to reproduce and make ...
Plants are living: They grow and die. They produce new individuals. They are made of cells. They need energy, nutrients, air and water. They respond to their environment. Plants are different to ...
Use this interactive to label parts of a flower. Drag and drop the text labels onto the boxes next to the diagram. Selecting or hovering over a box will highlight each area in the diagram.
Breeding a new apple cultivar takes a long time and involves many steps. The aim is to produce high-quality fruit that consumers will like and want to buy. Breeding apples to increase quality The ...
An inquiry approach is a method often used in science education. The question bank provides an initial list of questions about pollination and places where their answers can be found. The article ...
Dr Mark Goodwin of Plant & Food Research explains what artificial pollination is and why it is needed for kiwifruit. Some work of the company PollenPlus is shown, including their QuadDuster ...
Getting good crops of avocados in New Zealand is not always easy, and pollination is part of the problem. The avocado is a fruit tree introduced to New Zealand from Central America. It likes warm ...
Dr Mark Goodwin of Plant & Food Research explains how flowering plants use self-pollination or cross-pollination in their reproduction. He uses kiwifruit and avocado as examples to show how ...
What usually happens when you cut up a piece of fruit to eat or to put in a salad? If it is an apple, a pear, a peach or a plum, you probably cut out the seeds and put them in the compost bin ...
Most flowers have the same basic parts, even though they come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours. Flowers are there to make sure that pollination and fertilisation take place, so that ...
Next time you eat a kiwifruit, cut it in half and look at it before taking a bite. Look for the little seeds – most kiwifruit have about 1,000, so you can’t miss them. To get seeds in a ...
What is a mast? You might be forgiven for thinking it had more to do with ships than conservation! The term comes from the ancient English word ‘mæst’, which was used to refer to years when ...
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the most important pollinators of many cultivated food crops and other flowering plants. These plants would be in trouble without bees, and so would we. Rights ...
