The Overstory by Richard Powers, 2018. William Heinemann. As a would-be botanical educator who’s reviewed a lot of botany texts over the years, I don’t really have time to review – or just read – ‘novels’. But, having...
A new paper in Science highlights how variation in an environment can mean plants have no single solution for survival. Where conditions change, genetic diversity can be the best option for a species.
How will plants respond to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere? Botanists at BIFoR, the Birmingham Institute for Forest Research have gone underground to find some of the answers.
A new paper in PLOS One says trees outside your house can act as sentinels tracking the concentrations of potentially hazardous chemicals in your home's air.
For International Women's Day 2017, we asked plant biologist Dr Zoë Popper to write about a typical day in her working life. Here, she reflects on the importance of diversity in her job.
Plant science has a central role to play in so many of the global challenges facing the world today, including our future food security, the conservation of biodiversity, sustaining ecosystem services, improving global...
There are numerous examples in nature of distantly-related organisms converging on similar shapes that have proved useful to each. This convergent evolution can generate strikingly similar but independently evolved...
Genetically-modifed crops have never found the acceptability in Europe that they have in other parts of the World, notably the USA. There lots of reasons for this, ranging from ill-infomed two-headed monster theories to...
I’ve seen a new approach to use of ornamental plants several occasions recently: walls of plants covering outdoor and indoor sites. At the indoor site, in Heathrow Airport, I was even more happy to see that...