From couch potatoes sprout potential botanists.
Tag - plant blindness
Renata Cantoro
Plant science, the secret’s out!
The Science of Plants: Inside their secret world by Dorling Kindersley, 2022. Dorling Kindersley, published in association with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. I had a great sense of déjà vu (Stephanie Pappas) when looking...
Nigel Chaffey
House plants – the exotic within the home
Should African Violets have a conservation tariff to help protect their natural habitats? A new book asks some serious questions about the plants with which we share our homes.
Crime Scene Botanics, the forensic side of botany
Planting Clues should not only appeal to the general reader, but will also serve well as a textbook for an undergraduate course on forensic botany.
Greening the next generation
The Green Planet by Leisa Stewart–Sharpe and Kim Smith, 2022. Puffin Books (an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies). Not so long ago I appraised The Green Planet by Simon Barnes. Although I had...
Are Botanists Threatened with Extinction?
Scientists argue that we won't be able to protect the natural world, if we're not training the next generation of botanists with the necessary skills, writes Sebastian Stroud.
Sebastian Stroud
Plant parables for the 21st Century
A lifestyle guide where plants take the lead instead of sitting in the background.
Merlin’s magnificent mushroom masterpiece
A fascinating book examines fungi not as something apart from the rest of the world, but as something intertwined with other life on the planet.
Plant blindness eradicated *
Side-view of the human eye, viewed approximately 90 degrees temporal, illustrating how the iris and pupil appear rotated towards the viewer due to the optical properties of the cornea, by Paul Savage Plant blindness...
What real people think about plants
Vickery’s Folk Flora: An A-Z of the Folklore and Uses of British and Irish Plants by Roy Vickery, 2019. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. For the past several weeks I’ve been tackling Rebecca Armstrong’s Vergil’s Green...
Plant blindness in smartphone identification applications – are we passing on our biases to our helpful apps?
It is well-known that people are better at identifying animals than plants and this relative inability of people to identify plants is increasingly termed “plant blindness”. Recent research has identified links between...
Karen L Bacon
Julie Peacock
Tackling plant blindness: Botany by stealth…
School lessons devoted to plants may be off-putting to those students who are already plant-averse. So, why not smuggle bits of plant information into lessons on topics as diverse as Geography, History, Art &...
The Big Botany Challenge – promoting passion for plants in our schools!
Jonathan Mitchley on a symposium coming to Reading University in November to help fight plant blindness.
Guest Author
Check beneath your boots…
When people mention plant blindness* they tend to focus on the ‘lack of appreciation of the role of plants in the world’ notion. That is important, but there has always been another side to plant blindness, people’s...
