Wake-Up America, Climate Change Is Real, Take Action
Charlotte ScottPlants with purple stems span a genuinely wide range of purposes for that coloring, from a simple cosmetic trait bred into ornamental vegetables to one of the single most important safety features separating a deadly wild plant from its harmless relatives. Stem color in particular carries outsized identification value in the carrot family, where a … Read more
Plants with purple leaves and red flowers combine 2 shades that sit close together on the color wheel, which is part of why breeders have found it easier to pair them reliably than the more visually distant combination of purple leaves with true blue or yellow blooms. Both colors typically trace back to related anthocyanin … Read more
Safe weeds for chickens turn out to include most of the common lawn and garden plants that homeowners spend their weekends pulling, since backyard flocks are considerably better equipped than most mammals to self-regulate how much of any one plant they eat. According to Penn State Extension’s poultry education program, proper identification remains essential for … Read more
Poisonous plants with purple berries present a genuinely tricky identification challenge, since purple and blue-black fruit is exactly the color most people associate with safe, familiar options like blueberries, concord grapes, and elderberries. That overlap in color, rather than any single toxic look, is precisely why purple berries deserve more careful identification than almost any … Read more
Plants with purple leaves and yellow flowers combine 2 pigment systems that work almost independently of each other, since the purple in the foliage comes from anthocyanins concentrated in the leaf tissue, while the yellow in the flowers typically comes from an entirely separate group of pigments called carotenoids or flavonoids. That independence explains why … Read more
Plants with purple leaves get their coloring from anthocyanin pigments, the same class of compounds responsible for red autumn foliage and the skin color of grapes and blueberries, produced in concentrations high enough to overwhelm the green chlorophyll underneath. Because that pigment production generally intensifies with stronger light and cooler temperatures, most purple-leaved plants show … Read more
Plants with green and purple leaves get that combination from anthocyanin pigments layered over or alongside chlorophyll rather than replacing it entirely, which is exactly why so many of these plants show genuine green tissue somewhere on the leaf, whether as an undertone beneath a purple surface, a network of veins, or a separate zone … Read more
Plants with blue and black leaves get their striking coloring from two completely different sources, neither of which involves an actual blue or black pigment, since no such pigment exists in plant foliage. According to Oregon State University’s Landscape Plants database, the silvery-blue color seen on plants like Colorado blue spruce comes from a waxy … Read more
Controlling weeds in centipede grass lawns requires a genuinely different approach than managing weeds in most other turfgrass, since centipede is unusually sensitive to several of the herbicides and cultural practices that work perfectly well on bermudagrass, zoysia, or cool-season lawns. According to University of Tennessee Extension’s turfgrass weed science program, centipedegrass is intolerant of … Read more
Plants with green leaves and red veins get that contrast from anthocyanin pigments concentrated specifically along the vascular tissue running through each leaf, rather than spread evenly across the whole leaf surface the way solid red or purple foliage typically develops. That concentration along the veins isn’t just decorative, since the vascular bundles are also … Read more