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What do you know about leaves???

Nature’s Fabric: Leaves in Science and Culture by David Lee, 2017. University of Chicago Press. Ever so occasionally one comes across a book that makes one think, “That’s the book I’d like to have written”. Well...

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

New plant journal

It just had to happen, but we didn’t know it would take nearly 150 years to come to fruition. And fruition is an apt word because the creation of a new botanical journal has recently been announced by the publishers...

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Bryophyte ‘sperminator’…

Co-opting animals to help with pollination is a major event in flower (angiosperm) biology – and is very much a do-or-die act. But have you ever considered that a similar role might be performed by animals in the case...

Image: Alan Collmer, Cornell University/Wikimedia Commons.

COR, nice one, Mr Microbe!

Although open stomata are necessary for plants to take up CO2 for photosynthesis, this also permits loss of precious water – by transpiration, the so-called necessary evil of photosynthesis. But, surely, nothing worse...

Image: Hannes Grobe, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany/Wikimedia Commons.

That sinking feeling…

Whilst forests – aided and abetted by cryptogams (see my previous post) – have a major role as biotic carbon sinks on land, in the oceans that role is largely down to the activity of cryptogamous phytoplankton, which...

Image: ‘Crabtree watching the Transit of Venus A.D. 1639’ by Ford Madox Brown; a mural at the Town Hall of Manchester, UK.

Transient VENUS

This year’s transit of Venus reminds me – albeit belatedly – to applaud the hard-working botanists of the Universities of Nottingham (UK), Ghent (Belgium), Leeds (UK) and Lyon (France) who have been exploring a more...