Uses and Abuses of Plant-Derived Smoke is a book I stumbled upon while looking for something else. It's tempting to say it's a very niche subject; the authors say this is the first book on the topic. After reading the...
Author - Alun Salt
Alun Salt
Social media and Google Analytics – who’s interested in botany?
We’re coming round to our annual assessment here at AoBBlog. Spurred by JSTOR Plants and their blog post on Social Media we’re sharing our thoughts. And if you have better thoughts we’d welcome them as a comment...
Dogs, blossom and wine
The life led by the ancients was rude and illiterate; still, as will be readily seen, the observations they made were not less remarkable for ingenuity than are the theories of the present day. Pliny the Elder Kamoun...
New Special Issue: Plant Mating Systems
We have a new special issue out on Plant Mating Systems, with a couple of free access posts. Gynodioecy to dioecy: are we there yet? by Rachel B. Spigler and Tia-Lynn Ashman is a review of the evolution of sexes and...
Go to work on a potato
I didn’t do modern history at school so my impression of the industrial revolution is largely a mish-mash of pop history and some misremembered Industrial Archaeology courses. What I do recall is that the emphasis...
Does rain forest grow back? Archaeology might have the answer
Most international archaeological work in South America has concentrated on the Andes for various reasons. It’s more accessible, the ruins are more visible, there’s a better ethnohistorical record from the...
Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant
I thought this was an interesting video on hidden patterns in nature.
Schrödinger’s History (TIME 100)
How can you say something is historically important or not unless you observe it? What happens if you set up conditions where you intentionally cannot observe a site’s historical importance? I said in the opening...
In search of the Platzgeist (TIME 100)
It’s easy to pin scientific credit on a person. He or she usually has a name on the key publication, but how do you credit a place? Science is a human activity, so is it just the humans that matter or are there...
The scale of science and history (TIME 100)
TIME has recently published 100 greatest places in the world. The book is a collection of sites that, the editors argue, have had the biggest impact on world history. It’s excellent blog material because hardly...
A gift for the anti-Botanist
With a world full of fascinating life-forms, it’s always easy to find a gift for a botanist. There’s so many plants to choose from, but what can you get for a friend without green fingers? What can you get...
The fashionably late arrival of cucumbers in Europe #bad11
You might put together a salad from what you’ve grown in your back garden, but it’s a surprisingly cosmopolitan meal. Tomatoes came from Mesoamerica and if you have potato salad, then you have the Incas of South...
Blog Action Day 2011: Let’s Talk About Food #bad11
Blog Action Day is an annual event that encourages bloggers to talk about a specific topic. This year the theme is Food and it seems like an excellent topic for botanical bloggers. The day is October 16, which gives...
Autumn Clean
I’ve been tidying up my online presence, RSS feeds and so on for the new academic year. I’ll be moving my life sciences posts to a professional account on Google Plus, In some ways this is the wrong way...
