Two people gathering seeds

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.
Potted herbs sitting on a windowsill

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.
Mary Somerset

The Beaufort Botanist and Her “Innocent Diversion”

Despite the twelve volume herbarium she created, this seventeenth-century scientist earned little recognition. 
Orchids in a Wardian Case

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.
India Campbell and Child

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.
Serengeti

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.
Colored illustration of blueberries

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.
The inside of a quant Victorian parlor with mustard wallpaper, an intricately carved piano, and decor ranging from colorful flowers to vases

“The Culture of the Copy”: Victorians’ Obsession With Wax Flowers

Wax flowers were a major obsession of Victorian women, allowing them to combine art and industry.
Close-up of a diamond held by jeweler's tweezers

Got Plants? You May Also Have Diamonds!

The use of plants as indicators for specific environmental conditions
A Gall Wasp on a horizontal stalk

Alfred C. Kinsey On Gall Wasps and Edible Plants

Alfred Kinsey was a professor of entomology before becoming a sexologist.