Palm by Fred Gray 2018. Reaktion Books Ltd. Fred Gray’s Palm [hereafter referred to as … Palm] is the second title in Reaktion Books’ Botanical series I’ve reviewed. The first was Stephen Harris’ Sunflowers, a super...
Tag - economic botany
Nigel Chaffey
80 wonderful trees and their stories
Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori 2018. Laurence King Publishing Ltd. Stephen Barstow did it with plants, Dan Cruikshank did it with man-made ‘treasures’, and now Jonathan Drori’s done it with trees. Done...
Taking Glycine to the max!
The Story of Soy by Christine du Bois 2018. Reaktion Books Ltd. Before encountering Christine du Bois’ book, The Story of Soy, I had little real idea about what soy was. OK, as a botanist I know it was a legume, Glycine...
The cosmopolitan Compositae (or Sunflowers at large…)
Sunflowers by Stephen Harris 2018. Reaktion Books Ltd. Stephen Harris’ Sunflowers isn’t about sunflowers. OK, correction, it is, but it’s not just about sunflowers. Rather, the book celebrates the sunflower family, the...
Introducing The Global Flora
At Cuttings HQ we love a new botany journal – even if it’s technically described as a serial. So, we were really pleased to find out about The Global Flora, whose first issue was launched in January 2018. Published by...
All the world’s plants are in here (well, almost…)
Plants of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Vascular Plants by Maarten JM Christenhusz, Michael F Fay and Mark W Chase, 2017. Kew Publishing/University of Chicago Press. One of the great botanical pleasures I...
Seed dispersal that’s hard to swallow
The argan tree doesn't have to be annoying to really get your goat.
Plants to the rescue of animals…
From tusks to teeth, plants can step in where animals break down.
Reducing P uptake by plants
Some things are hard to digest, but is an excess of phosphorus really one of them?
Botany in the 317 years-long century…
The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century. Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan and Anatole Tchikine (Editors). Dumbarton Oaks, 2016. Notwithstanding the importance of botany to the future well-being and survival...
Super silk and mine-detectors
Modern materials get solve long-standing problems, when they get a helping hand from plants.
Promoting the planet’s plants-and-people future [Or, Probably the best jobs in British Botany…]
We’re not in the habit of posting job advertisements in this column – especially when the application deadlines will have long passed when this collection is published – but some jobs are just too important (and Plant...
369,400…and counting(!)
Being an avid supporter of the importance of plants (I do hope that’s come over quite strongly in my various blog items..?), I’m always keen to share with my students [well, any- and everybody really…] how many plant...
Botanotechnoinspirationals
This item concerns uses of botanical bits-and-pieces in ways that Nature never intended. But having also brought forth Man, that natural entity has given that creation’s ingenuity free rein and he has come up with...
