A silent green world

Unlike any animal, which attracts the immediate curiosity of children and adults because basically there are frequent similarities with the human animal, a plant does not always arouse sensations.

In cities, plants are often besieged by cars

From the description of the vital phenomena we pass to the analysis of the most disparate forms and adaptations. After the plants that constitute the characterizing element

of natural environments, we treat those used by man, both in food and in technical uses. A systematic system, richly illustrated, provides an overall framework for finding your way around the complex classification issues. Numerous historical, ecological and naturalistic factsheets accompany and supplement the text, to help the reader discover the importance of the "silent green world" on which life on Earth depends.Sometimes, in fact, one can marvel at the size, the beauty of the flowers, the intoxicating scent, but usually there is indifference to a green mass in which you cannot see a clear difference compared to another neighbor.

We then proceed considering the green world as a background, a frame in which our life unfolds.

All this is due to the apparent static nature of the plants with which we have greater relations; the plants, solidly rooted to the ground, live passively ntowards external changes, unable to react to destructive human interventions or to those of atmospheric and natural agents.

When a leaf or a flower is torn, not a cry, not a reaction from these strange organisms; only when felling a tree, after the noise of the chainsaw and the creaking, the final thud and the silence that follow them strike the imagination. Although so vulnerable, however, plants have developed mechanisms throughout their history that have so far been able to overcome almost all the critical moments that persist in the life of an organism, relying on a fundamental principle of nature: what matters is the maintenance over time of the species, not of the individual.

In this way, infinite adaptations are discovered that often exceed man's ability to intervene on nature, trying to take away space from what is apparently not useful to favor food, industrial and forest plants.

The roads leading to the mountains make the spaces dominated by greenery accessible.

In the alteration of the original balance, however, gaps remain or always form, immediately occupied by other or new plants that will know how to make full use of the space left to them.

All this happens without great clamor, often manifesting itself only to specialists; species forgotten until yesterday suddenly become very common weeds, others migrate from distant countries, still others disappear because the environments suitable for their survival are lacking or because, commonly cultivated in the past, they are no longer required by the market.

When we move to our cities, we seldom notice the large crowns of some trees, or we are disturbed by the flowering of some ornamental, which lets the corollas fade to "dirty" the cars; let's not talk about the autumn fall of the chestnuts, which are also capable of leaving their mark on the expensive (but subtle) bodywork. Let's try to transform that common idea that we have of the lawn: no longer a green carpet, made up of indistinct elements, but a balanced and not random set of different plants, especially with different needs and vital rhythms, with showy or inconspicuous shapes. Let's try to raise your head and look at the trees of the first order; there are also predators of predators (super predators). These are located at the top of the so-called "trophic or food pyramid", which we can imagine building by superimposing the biomass (quantity of organic matter produced) in the individual levels. Since to keep the living of a level alive it is necessary to consume a part of the energy that arrives there, passing from one level to another the biomass will be gradually less. This explains why large predators are always less in number than the prey they feed on. Each element of the various levels depends on the previous level, thus forming a food chain that always has plants at the beginning.

The natural shape of the plants can also be modified according to risky geometries, with lapotization called topiary art.

It should be emphasized that the passage of substances does not occur only from one level to another, but at each level there are organisms defined as "restitutors", who use the remains of plants and living things in general, transforming them into simpler substances (decomposition) and returning them to the environment in the form of an inorganic substance (remineralization); in this sense, in addition to numerous decomposers such as insects, worms, fungi, above all many bacteria that make inorganic materials such as water, carbon dioxide and minerals available to the environment, used by green plants in the synthesis of organic compounds, are fundamental. In the oceans and waters the primary producers are mainly microscopic plants, single-celled algae, which make up phytoplankton. The food chain of the seas has in these tiny organisms the origin of all the vital phenomena that reach up to the greatest living beings on Earth, such as the blue whale.