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Gardeners and Nature lovers already appreciate the botanical wonders around us, but plants are more than floral beauties. We owe the air we breathe to them, all of our food, and much of our housing. Animals from elephants to ants depend on plant-life. And the world's flora has an equally intimate relationship with the birds, insects, mammals and humans around them.

Explore these relationships and find the latest botany discoveries through the links below.

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Maybe The Plant Doesn't Want To Be Seen

"The dried bracts on a rare woodland plant, Monotropsis odorata, might serve a similar purpose as the stripes on a tiger or the grey coloration of the wings of the peppered moth, namely to hide."

Boy Plants, Girl Plants and Their Fungal Friends

"For species with separate male and female plants, do interactions with mycorrhizal fungi vary between the sexes and consequently play a role in the male/female structure of the population?"

Acacias That Entice Ants Know When To Repel Them, Too

"The plants with the closest relationships with ants — those that provided homes for their miniature guard army — produced the chemicals that were most effective at keeping the ants at bay."

Score One For The Insects

"Dutch ecologist Roxina Soler and her colleagues have discovered that subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects can communicate with each other by using plants as telephones."

Add Tomatoes and Petunias To List Of Carnivorous Plants

"We may be surrounded by many more murderous plants than we think."

What Doesn't Kill Us

"When it comes to maintaining and accentuating the mind-boggling plant diversity of the Amazon rain forests, insects are a friend, not a foe, according to a new study. '…The point is that insect herbivores magnify the differences between the habitat.'"

Sweat The Small Stuff

"A tropical tree creates insect nurseries in its buds for miniscule pollinators, say German scientists. This novel strategy relies on thrips, insects rarely considered pollinators. Darwin dismissed thrips as annoyances that fouled his pollination experiments, and since then biologists studying pollination haven't paid much attention to this dot of a creature. "