Scientists Are Flying Drones To Find This Plant A Partner
on its last legs: so old, weak, or damaged that it is about to fail or die
In Edinburgh, there is a hospital where every patient is a plant. Rosanna Costello opened the Hilda Houseplant Hospital, the first of its kind in Britain. People bring in plants that are sick or dying. Some arrive on their last legs, with brown leaves and drooping stems. Rosanna checks each one like a doctor. Sick plants go into quarantine, then get repotted, trimmed, and fed. Most of these plants cost little to replace, but devoted owners pay to rescue them anyway.
A sick houseplant can be healed. But how do you save the loneliest plant in the world? Cycads are ancient plants that have existed for 300 million years and once fed the dinosaurs. In those days they covered much of the Earth, but today almost all are gone. In 1895, a botanist found one rare cycad on a hillside in South Africa. No one has ever found another like it in the wild. The plant is male, and to make seeds it needs a female. None has ever been found. For over a hundred years, clones of it have grown at Kew Gardens in London. Today scientists fly drones over old forests and use AI to search for a female. This species survived the dinosaurs and the ice ages. Whether it survives now depends on finding a mate that may or may not exist.
Sample sentences
My old laptop is on its last legs, so I save my work every few minutes just in case.
The washing machine has been making strange noises for weeks, and I think it is finally on its last legs.
Our car is on its last legs, but we are hoping it survives one more winter.
Read More
UK Hospital Where the Patients Are Houseplants (Good News Network)
Wood like to meet: the loneliest plant in the world (Kew)
The World’s Loneliest Plant Could Soon Find a Mate With a Little Help From AI (Smithsonian)
