Just over a year ago, when most people in the UK were surviving a bitterly cold December, I was enjoying an Australian summer. I was up in the Otway Ranges in Southern Victoria surrounded by some of the tallest flowering plants on earth. These are mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans (see Figure 1). The trees in this glade were relatively small, no more than 70 metres in height. They were nevertheless impressive, but some are truly spectacular. One of them, recently discovered in Tasmania, has been named the Centurion tree. It was almost 100 metres in height when last measured (99.6 metres in 2009). To see how this was done, visit http://tinyurl.com/6c32hpw.
In this column, we start by looking at one of the ways in which water moves up the trunk of one of these giants to the leaves of the crown. Once we have made sure of the biology involved, we look at some of the questions that you might expect on this topic in an A-level unit test, questions that are based on explaining the results of other scientists’ investigations.
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
