每日一花

A complete botanical profile of the Sensitive Plant: a tropical Brazilian species whose leaves snap shut within a second of being touched, driven by the same electrochemical logic as animal nerve impulses. What sets it apart is a 2014 experiment showing the plant can habituate — learn to stop responding to a harmless stimulus — and retain that memory for at least 28 days, despite having no neurons.

A complete botanical profile of the world's smallest water lily: a Rwandan species with 2 cm pads and 1 cm flowers, whose entire wild habitat — a single geothermal hot spring — was diverted for irrigation in the 2000s, rendering it extinct in the wild. Saved from total extinction by a Kew Gardens horticulturalist who worked out that the plants need warm soil at the roots, not warm surface water.

A complete botanical profile of the Great Yellow Gentian: a high-altitude European plant that waits up to seven years before its first flower, lives for more than six decades underground, and became the defining bitter flavour in Angostura, Aperol, and Suze — now protected by law across 20+ countries because the root takes so long to grow.