Masting is what biologists call the pattern of trees for miles around synchronizing to all produce lots of seeds − or very few. Why and how do they get on schedule?
Buttongrass survives and rapidly regrows after a fire. Tasmania, Australia.
Tim Rudman/Flickr
A new IPCC report has called for radical changes in food production to avoid catastrophic climate change. Rice-fish farming and mixed crops could help.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
John and Penny/Shutterstock
Plants clearly lack brains but does all intelligence have to look like our own?
Matchstick banksia (Banksia cuneate). There are only about 500 of these plants left in the wild at 11 different sites, with much of its habitat having been historically cleared for agriculture.
Andrew Crawford/Threatened Species Hub
There are over 100 species of wild coffee, but only a few supply the world’s morning caffeine kick. Sadly, climate change and disease could be about to change that.
Plant blindness can be solved but it wont be easy.
Melburnians admire the first primrose to arrive in the colony, transported by a Wardian case, in Edward Hopley’s A Primrose from England, circa 1855.
Bendigo Art Gallery, Gift of Mr and Mrs Leonard Lansell 1964.
A wood and glass case invented in the early 19th-century transformed the movement of plants around the world. In Melbourne, several thousand people greeted a primrose on its arrival from England.
Berzelia stokoei, one of the 3% of plants in South Africa that are found nowhere else in the world.
Marinda Koekemoer
Venus flytrap plants have ‘traps’ that snap shut on insect prey. But they also rely on insects for pollination. New research suggests how the plant avoids eating its allies.