Botany One

Here's this week’s round up of the most shared items on Bluesky. It's been a frustrating week, this week. Not because it's difficult to track down papers, but the opposite. There's plenty here that I'd want to read properly and write about. But there's also plenty that didn't make the list that was interesting too. Enough things came in on Friday alone, that I could be busy for a week. For some r…

Today marks World Plant Milk Day. You don’t get literal milk from plants, but if the term “plant milk” upsets you, it’s a term that’s been used for hundreds of years in English. If, like me, you wonder where the milk comes from, there’s not single part of a plant that gets “milked”. Soy and pea milks come from cotyledons, the seed leaves, where the plant has stored protein to power a seedling. Al…

Apps are getting better and better at identifying plants, but are they ready for surveys in the field?

We have a new tool at Botany One that I’m finding helpful when I come across a species that I’m not familiar with: Species Dashboard. When I read about a new species there are plenty of places I can look for information. Wikipedia, Plants of the World Online, GBIF and others. That means visiting each site individually, which means remembering which sites to visit, or opening multiple bookmarks an…

Botany One interviews Yago Barros Souza, a Brazilian plant biogeographer exploring how evolution, geography and environment shape plant diversity across mountains and entire landscapes.

A forest may remain standing after selective logging, but its hidden biodiversity can still unravel as the largest trees disappear.

This week: A sneaky orchid, the two sides of a leaf, and why a plant needs the bear necessities.

This week’s plant is a plant of many names. I searched for it as Chamaenerion latifolium , but Plants of the World Online lists that as a synonym of Epilobium latifolium . It’s not a settled argument as the Flora of North America keeps with Chamaenerion latifolium , so

Here's this week’s round up of the most shared items on Bluesky. I've had a screaming alert though my phone from the government telling me not to have any barbecues because of the fire risk, so the most shared paper this week is unfortunately timely. The slightly late publication this week is also connected to the heat. I'm not coping well with it, but that's going to be a common experience for m…

Botanist and mycologist Elias Magnus Fries was born on this day in 1794, in Sweden. It might seem odd using a mycologist as a seed for the Sudoku Garden on a botany blog, but at the time mycology was a branch of botany, and Fries was an exceptional mycologist. Between 1821 and 1832, he published three volumes of Systema mycologicum. This study systematically classified fungi based on their fruiti…

If you were to travel back in time six thousand years to North America, you could wander through Hemlock forests. There were places where it dominated forests but somehow, in the middle of the stable Holocene, something changed.

Half the world's leaf surface faces downwards, and until recently nobody had checked whether the bacteria living there were doing anything different.

To germinate in India's dry forests, some seeds must pass through a sloth bear's gut. Its digestion softens rock-hard seeds to regenerate native flora, but with an unexpected twist: it also unintentionally helps spread an invasive plant.

Researchers discover the first case of floral mimicry in South America, showing how a nectarless orchid poses as a Jacaranda to deceive pollinators.

Lemurs, people-pleasing flowers, interactions between plants and pollinators, an interview with Larissa Verona and more.

Something strange in your neighbourhood? Who you gonna call? Skip the Ghostbusters and try a botanist.

Here's this week’s round up of the most shared items on Bluesky. For a change I’ve put a Mimulus as the cover photo rather than Arabidopsis, as Mimulus was the topic of the most popular paper. Papers behind a paywall are marked 💰otherwise they're free to access at time of checking. How this works We scan posts by people on the Botany Auto list and pull out the entries with links to papers. Every …

Today is International Cat Day, and also the fifth anniversary of me offering our office manager Stanley Fluffypants a job. He turned up at the back door asking if we needed someone to supervise preparing kitten biscuits to feed the local hedgehogs. If you’re looking for a plant to celebrate the day with your cat, Nepeta cataria, Catnip is the obvious choice. But what if your cat isn’t a fan? Act…

Global warming could interfere with the scents that guide pollinators to flowers, threatening ecological interactions long before species disappear.