What plant life on a distant planet might look like, according to the folks at Scientific American.

A couple of weeks ago, I was all ready to blog about the amazing plants that James Cameron and his crew invented for the movie Avatar, but Michele Owens, at Garden Rant, beat me to it. That’s OK. As it turns out, a bit of Googling turns up all sorts of fascinating stuff on the theme of alien plants. In April, 2008, the Scientific American website featured a slide show called “The Color of Plants on Other Worlds,” which showed what plants might look like on planets that revolve around stars radically different from our own sun. On a planet whose sun is a red dwarf, for example, plants might evolve to be completely black in order to absorb as much energy as possible from the feeble star. In contrast, plants subjected to the superabundant energy of a type F supergiant might be bright blue and shiny in order to deflect the intense radiation. Giant blue egg-shaped plants would certainly present intriguing design possibilities.

Getting back to Avatar, there was an interesting interview in the Los Angeles Times the other week with Jodie Holt, a plant physiologist and chairwoman of the department of botany and plant sciences at U.C. Riverside, who consulted with the movie’s producers and set designers about the plant life of Pandora, the distant moon on which the movie is set. She not only suggested the mechanism whereby the plants of Pandora communicate with all other life forms (it’s called “signal transduction”), she even gave some of the plants pseudo Latin binomials (Pseudocycas altissima, Obesus rotundus). It all sounds as though it was a great deal of fun—inventing a whole world full of plants.

Which got me thinking: if you could invent a plant—make it absolutely anything you wanted—what would it be? I think mine would be something like a hardy, evergreen jacaranda tree, but with even deeper blue flowers. What would yours be?

I really, really want my own phosphorescent forest. Still from Avatar, 20th Century Fox.