Are Galls Miracle Cures or Just Weird Growths on Plants?
For millennia, humans have exploited galls for medicine, fuel, food, tanning, and dyeing. Some people have considered them miraculous.
Plant of the Month: The Sensitive Plant
This plant’s animal-like behavior and alleged love-provoking abilities have sparked the imagination of everyone from early modern yogis to today’s scientists.
Plant of the Month: Agave
The international popularity of tequila threatens the quantity, health, and biodiversity of all species of agave.
Can Crops’ Wild Relatives Save Troubled Agriculture?
Cultivating a limited number of crops reduced the genetic diversity of plants, endangering harvests. Seed collectors hope to fix it by finding the plants’ wild cousins.
Three Ways to Turn Your Apartment into a Sustainable Garden
Even the smallest city dwelling has enough space for a mini-meadow or a few flower pots.
The Beaufort Botanist and Her “Innocent Diversion”
Despite the twelve volume herbarium she created, this seventeenth-century scientist earned little recognition.
The Accidental Invention of Terrariums
Victorian London became obsessed with Ward's cases, which protected plants from the city's toxic pollution -- and piqued peoples' imaginations.
The New Victims of Climate Change: Plants, Parasites, and Pregnant Women
The recent series of hurricanes has demonstrated, climate change is no longer a nebulous futuristic menace, but an existential threat.
Plants Know When They Are Being Eaten. (And They Fight Back.)
Plants have long employed a variety of defensive strategies against herbivores, but the scope and sophistication of these defenses is still being understood.
The Delicious Origins of the Domesticated Blueberry
Frederick Coville and Elizabeth White, two strangers, domesticated the blueberry together. They valued beauty and worked to support local communities.