Research

100 years old
The cherry blossom trees in the nation’s capital turn 100 this year. Japan gave the U.S. 3,000 trees in 1912, and while cherry blossom trees usually survive for about 50 years, more than 100 of the original trees are still alive today, Rob DeFeo, the National Park Service chief horticulturalist told the Associated Press. The trees attract about a million visitors each year.

34 cents
The Georgia Urban Ag Council’s annual survey of sod producers found turfgrass prices are rising and the two species in greatest production (bermudagrass and zoysiagrass) are both in low supply. The contributing factors that explain the data are basic economic, drought and industry construction – the number of sod producers and total acres of turfgrass production in Georgia has declined in the last five years.

The average price per square foot for a truckload of bermudagrass delivered to the Atlanta area or within 100 miles of the farm rose from 16.3 cents in 2011 to 17.7 cents in 2012. Zoysiagrass went from 31.1 cents to 34.5 St. Augustinegrass reached its greatest price in five years, averaging 27.2 cents in 2011 and 34 cents in 2012.

How much do small-business owners hate dealing with legal matters?
A new survey by RocketLawyer breaks it down like this:

39%
A survey of 100,000 small businesses that sell products on Facebook found that 39% of them have also bought ad space on the social media site. Payvment, the Facebook ecommerce platform that administered the survey, found 70% said they plan to use Facebook ads again. Of those surveyed, 68% said fan and customer acquisition was the main reason for continuing their ad campaign, while 60% said it was the ability to start and stop campaigns.

30,000 years old
That’s right, researchers at the Russian Academy of Science’s Soil Cryology Lab grew flowers using 30,000 year-old seeds found preserved in the country’s permafrost. S. stenophylla is the oldest known plant species to be revived from ancient seeds, topping the 2,000 year-old “Phoenix palm,” which was grown by Israeli scientists.