Botany One

If you have an apple orchard, what you need are bees.

Australia is notorious for flora and fauna that are poisonous, and that includes the food.

In nature, the embrace of the Cape sundew (Drosera capensis) is a death sentence for many insects.

My Spanish remains poor.

Plant of the Week this week is Alluaudiopsis marnieriana.

A difficult week for me this week as all three top papers are genetics and a little beyond me.

October 15-17 hosts the Kannamesai festival at Ise jingū, Japan.

Few foods have had as many cultural lives as the potato.

When we think about restoring a degraded environment, trees and other vascular plants usually receive most of the attention.

A butterwort is a killer.

Açaí has conquered the world, generating millions of euros and supporting countless families across the Amazon region.

It feels like autumn is finally arriving here.

This week’s plant of the week is chosen because I saw a photo and has to check that it wasn’t an AI hallucination.

The email is a little late this week, partly because I'm behind in work and partly because I need to learn when to give up.

Today marks Fiji day, which gained its independence from the British in 1970.

Nature is full of partnerships between organisms, but even relationships considered beneficial do not always work in the same way.

A leaf is valuable.

Everyone is talking about the thrilling discovery of the new feline species in Los Yungas de Bolivia, Leopardus tilcayan.

Plants are incredibly diverse, and so are botanists!

Corallorhiza striata, striped coralroot, is an orchid found in North America, and it hates paying for anything.

Cities are a new kind of environment.

Life is all about trade-offs.

I’ve always been a bit jealous of people in North America or Africa, who can see birds as pollinators.

Announcing that the videos would start without a plan seemed like a good idea to give me a deadline to hit.

Bill Campbell’s observation of Thelymitra matthewsii, Matthew’s Spiral Sun Orchid, introduced me a species I hadn’t heard of before.

This week a good section of the selection are from bioRxiv, so they're free to access.

Today marks national foundation day in Korea, and a plant-based diet is a key element of the nation’s foundation myth.

In the northern Mediterranean, populations of Sonchus asper, a common annual plant often considered as a largely self-fertilising species, show important differences in their flowers and life forms.

Pollen and nectar are two of the most important resources for bees.

A plant has no nerves.

When humans build a city, they fundamentally change the natural world.

Mistletoe relies on its sticky seeds landing on suitable host tree branches to survive.

Bryophytes are surprisingly efficient travellers.

One of the things that annoys me, when I put together this newsletter, is that I'm keenly aware that I'll have read many papers that deserve attention that I'm not going to get round to telling people about.

Last week, I wrote about pokeweed, which got me thinking about other plants we eat that are poisonous when not properly cooked.

Here are the twenty most shared/liked/posted science papers from our survey this week.

Today marks the anniversary of the birth of John Chapman in 1774.

When a new neighbourhood is built, we typically see bulldozers clearing away the native vegetation, whilst gravel and concrete take over the ground, only for extensive turfgrass lawns with hardly any flowers to be laid at the end.

Like any other living organism, plants need food to survive, grow and reproduce.

Plants are incredibly diverse, and so are botanists!

It's the last week that I'll remind you that deadline for the Chief Editor position for in silico Plants is approaching.

Last week, I talked about my adventures foraging for pawpaws.

There's a slight delay to the email this week, as one of papers the system picked up as popular didn't match the post on Bluesky it was connected to, so I had to see which paper was the one that was supposed to be on the list.

On this day in 1991, two German tourists stumbled upon the remains of a mountaineer in the Ötztal Alps, between Italy and Austria.