Parasitism is a universal trait. I’ll relate here how a plant uses it successfully : lovely inflorescences and thus reproductive prowess, with no need to…
A scientist and a writer
Category: Plants
Botany, which I did study awhile in my youth, holds a continued interest.
Plants are remarkable organisms.
In writing about them, in these small vignettes I try to combine the scientific and the cultural, the bucolic and the utilitarian, and to convey some of my sense of wonder – in brief to try and emulate some of the eighteenth-century natural historians, with the information now available to us.
Landscapes and cityscapes worldwide have become Americanized. Starbucks coffeeshops and Macdonald fastfood restaurants proliferate. Likewise, the so-called GAFAM tech giant corporations — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple…
Sequoias are actual trees, with an acquired mythical status from their enormous size, resistance to fire and other scourges, and their most impressive antiquity, measured in…
The second Latin word in the official name of this plant means admirable, marvellous. Which definitely is pertinent. I would add weird. Friedrich Welwitsch was an…
My theme is the all-too-familiar, mankind the destroyer of nature and its masterpieces. Inadvertently? Not in this case, greed was and remains the main cause. The…
Is there a critical number of people for group behavior to become lemming-like? Is imitation a common feature for both humans and great apes? Whatever the…
It is known as the ‟humped bladderwort,‟ for the shape of irs trap. It is a carnivorous plant. Charles Darwin had the insight that this feeding…
We are awed by tall trees, such as redwoods and sequoias. As with elephants or whales, their very size leaves us feeling puny. Their antiquity is…
I won’t reiterate all of this well-known story, to me reminiscent of the novels by Jules Verne: a chance discovery, in a hidden Australian canyon, of…
This is a most generous plant, in the size and abundance of its flowers and leaves. To many of us, the magnolia tree (Magnolia grandiflora) is…