Alumna Digs Up the Lowdown on Plants in New Kids’ Book

The College of Education alumna and former educator got the idea by simply looking out her office window. Now an author of over a dozen children’s books, she specializes in making anything interesting. Her other popular titles include “High Flyers: 15 Inspiring Women Aviators and Astronauts” and her upcoming picture book “A Quilt of Stars,” co-written with astronaut Karen Nyberg and illustrated by Alida Massari.

“I did a little research ,and I soon got so engrossed in this whole idea of how cool plants are.” Staats says. The book, published by MIT Kids Press and featuring lush illustrations by Zoë Ingram, targets the 8- to 12-year-old crowd with fascinating facts about how plants flourish, even in the most extreme environments on earth.

She shares five facts to help people of any age delve into the strange and expansive world of plants:

Plants communicate with each other and us—even our lawns. “Fresh-mown grass smells so nice,” Staats says. “I associate that with summer, but it's actually a chemical reaction that those plants are giving out.” The smell is a signal to nearby plants that they might be in danger, too. Other plants send messages through the soil. For example, threads of fungi provide pathways for plants to find water and nutrients or even to communicate with different plant

The Swiss cheese plant climbs trees by sensing shadows. One of Staat’s favorite plants that didn’t make it into her book is the Swiss cheese plant. You may have seen this one as a houseplant, but in the wild, its adaptations help it climb trees to get closer to the sun. “As the plant grows up in those initial stages, it actually ‘looks’
around,” Staats says. “It senses where the shadows are and then it grows towards those.” The shadows mean that there’s probably a tree nearby.

Plants can be masters of disguise. At first, Staats thought plants as her subject would be too boring for kids. Then she discovered the dead horse arum, a plant featured in “Fantastic Flora.” “That plant disguises itself to look like a rotting piece of flesh,” she said. “The idea is to fool blow flies into coming closer, thinking that it's a piece of roadkill. Yum, yum, yum!” Once the blowflies go inside the plant, they get trapped and are coated in the dead horse arum’s pollen. When freed, the blowflies spread it all around.

Some tree seeds can move as fast as a race car. Another of Staats’ favorites is the sandbox tree, also called the dynamite tree. When the seed pods drop, they dry out, and after a time, explode. “The seeds literally shoot out at up to 150 miles an hour,” she explains. “That's faster than a car on the highway, right?” The “why,” she said, is so the seeds can get far enough away from the parent tree to avoid competing for the same soil, sunlight and water. Also colloquially called the Monkey-no-climb tree, it features poisonous sap and spikes along its bark to discourage animals from climbing it to eat all the seeds. “This is actually not even the most dangerous tree,” Staats added.

You may be closer to some fantastic flora than you think. Maryland, for example, is home to another of the plants in Staats' book: skunk cabbage. The plant’s namesake is its pungent smell, often described as rotting meat or skunk. The plant generates heat to spread its scent and attract pollinators. The heat also helps it to grow early in the season, even melting the snow around it.

Staats recommended making an effort to notice the sights, and smells, of your surroundings: “There’s probably a lot you’re missing if you’re just going from point A to point B.”