Kate Flint, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Images of wildfires are powerful, but can make climate catastrophe seem like something spectacular and distant. So some artists are focusing on the plants and bugs in our immediate surroundings.
Climate change is altering the smell of rosemary, affecting its quality and quantity.
Grégoire Lannoy/Flickr
Many roses are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses, shipped long distances or treated with chemicals. Here’s what to ask your florist or supermarket.
Ornamental craft made from palm leaves and pine cone in grass baskets are sold in Eswatini.
Deepa Pullanikkatil
That pre-sleep herbal tea may be doing many people a lot of good.
A honeybee (left), a scarab beetle (middle), and a fly (right) feeding on flowers of the white rock rose in a Mediterranean scrubland.
Aphrodite Kantsa.
Rather than trying to out-compete each other, flowers may work together to attract bees en masse. It’s the sort of approach that is effective in the world of advertising too.
Millions of flowers are imported to Australia from Kenya each year.
REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
During her lifetime, the paintings of Dutch artist Rachel Ruysch sold for higher prices than those of Rembrandt. Why, then, have her talents not been more widely acknowledged in the centuries since?
Poppies at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
katatrix/shuttershock.com
The wildflowers that WWI soldiers encountered in Europe become symbols of remembrance and the fragility of life. The red poppy in particular is a powerful motif in Australian war art and photography.