Plants are a really interesting topic for me. I can work all day, with plants, go home and do some gardening and then spend some of my evening reading about them.

One thing that amazes me is that flowers get pollinated and turn into seeds. Below are the flowers and flower buds of Castanospermum australe. The flowers alone are awesomely beautiful in my opinion. The colour is one I seem to have a fondness for that never existed until recently-being a redhead, anything orange was a no-no until about a year ago! Orange flowers are now my thing!

These lovely flowers turn into these large pods. They can have one seed or more, although the most I have seen is four seeds in one pod.

The fact that the flowers above turn into these massive seed pods containing these massive seeds always amazes me. It is a bit like magic really (even though I know it is a basic bit of biology), that stuff like this happens. Once you have the seeds, you can get a very nice tree with awesome orange flowers!

Another thing that I find fascinating with plants is that one genus of plants, and often one species with its cultivars, can have so many variations in flower colour and form. The results are often fabulously colourful shapes interesting.

Take the roses below. They are all roses, but the colours vary a lot, as do the flowers themselves. Some smell fabulous and some don’t smell at all. They are all great in the garden. They also attract lots of insects-today I saw ladybirds, bees and ladybird larvae (the latter happily eating some aphids, which was good to see).

I could go on all day, but I’ll leave it there for now. I will write more about why plants are so interesting in the coming weeks.