I love peppergrass. This is a great illustration of the middle part of the plant – there are actually some narrow, spiky-looking leaves that are even tastier. (I am not alone in this. The roots can apparently be used like the plant’s cousin, horseradish.)
Discovering peppergrass was probably one of the best [...]
How can this vine *know* what to look like? Science looks at the first known case of shape-shifting mimicry in the vegetable kingdom:
Fewer examples of mimicry—or crypsis—are known for plants. But as in some mistletoe species in Australia, all of these imposters copy only one other species. That’s not the case with the [...]
Energy Post calls it “the BIGGEST BREAKTHROUGH EVER!” That seems a bit much, but it is interesting that a Boeing-sponsored group in Abu Dhabi has figured out how to make super-clean, super-cheap oil from salt-tolerant desert plants:
What researchers at the Masdar Institute have been studying is a category of plants called halophytes. These [...]
National Geographic reveals what really goes on in a plant’s… mind?… when sap-thirsty plant killers are on the prowl:
[University of Wisconsin researcher John] Orrock and botanist Simon Gilroy show that black mustard plants can “hear” the chemical signals of approaching plant-eaters—and prepare to fight back.
“One of the things that makes plants so ecologically [...]
In the 11th century, this was the pinnacle of medical knowledge – a book called Kitab fi al-adwiyah al-mufradah compiled by an Andalusian scholar Abu Ja`far al-Ghafiqi.
It’s an illustrated guide to medicinal plants – a materia medica. Al-Ghafiqi, according to later historians, was “the greatest savant of medicinal plants, their names and their properties, [...]
BBC opens the weird world of vegetable communication, revealing the fungal networks plants use to signal one another:
But below ground, most land plants are connected by fungi called mycorrhizae.
The new study, published in Ecology Letters, is the first to demonstrate these fungi also aid in communication.
Researchers from the University of Aberdeen, the [...]
A hothouse flower, far from home.
Mr. Fitch drew this picture – one of an awful lot – for The Orchid Album: Comprised of Coloured Figures and Descriptions of New, Rare and Beautiful Orchidaceous Plants, a book published by B.S. Williams “at the Victoria and Paradise Nurseries, Upper Holloway, N.”
Australian digital artist Russell Kightley does scientific visualization.
I found this particular vision on Scientific Illustration.
