All good things come to an end…

This Cuttings collection is the last that will appear in the Annals of Botany journal. Since the column was launched on an unsuspecting world in January 2010 it’s been my unalloyed pleasure and joy to share with you my thoughts (admittedly, not always fully-formed or sensible…) on many topics with a loosely plant-based theme. If they’ve given any of you reading them a small fraction of the pleasure they’ve given me in researching and writing them, I can consider that a job well done. Along the way we’ve learnt some stuff, had a bit of a laugh, and generally realised that there is an awful lot of great plant science and plant-based stories all around us. I don’t know where I will be next month, but I hope to continue to educate, inform and entertain with tales from the botanical world somewhere, somehow, and that Plant Cuttings will rise again, like a phytological phoenix. I end by thanking Annals of Botany Chief Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison for allowing me the opportunity and privilege to create and curate this column and for his continued support of the Cuttings collections, and the team at Oxford University Press who’ve had the unenviable task of checking the hundreds of items, and the even more onerous one of ensuring that the thousands (? probably!) of URLs worked. Cheers! And farewell from Nigel Chaffey (aka Mr Plant Cuttings).

Pat Heslop-Harrison writes

All’s well that end’s well

We introduced ‘Plant Cuttings’ to Annals of Botany back in January 2010, as a round-up of notable plant-based items from the world’s media. With the inclusion of a news section in the Journal, we aimed to connect and build a community of botanists. We moved on to develop Botany One as the on-line news presence of Annals of Botany (originally as AoBBlog.com), and Plant Cuttings were also published on-line here, being important for developing the readership, informality and author-base for the blog. Now Botany One is independently edited from the journal, and is widely respected and read with its own community. Indeed, Botany One is ranked as the top botany website and blog for botanists and plant scientists, and the best blog for botany students. At this point, as your Editors do regularly, we have evaluated our Annals of Botany journal content, and have decided that Plant Cuttings should end after this issue, increasing our focus on our core aim of publishing the highest quality of rigorous, refereed science. We are so grateful to ‘Mr P. Cuttings’, personified as Dr Nigel Chaffey, for writing Plant Cuttings over nearly ten years, bringing together an eclectic range of plant-related topics with a characteristic humorous take that was all his own. I will miss reading them each month. Onwards!