Mosses are among the closest living relatives to Earth’s first land plants.
Arnon Polin/Shutterstock
New research has pinpointed the genetic boost behind one of the biggest transformations of life on Earth.
Need a handkerchief?
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Like many plants, onions have defenses to ward off creatures that may want to eat them. Their secret weapon is a kind of natural tear gas.
A mast year can be a squirrel’s dream come true.
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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
Not only can plants survive fire, they can use the experience of being burned to prepare themselves for future blazes.
HoangTuan_photography/Pixabay
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?
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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
A recent global survey found almost 600 plants have gone extinct. And this figure is likely to be an underestimate.
The short answer is that leaves fall off trees when they aren’t doing their job any more.
Emily Nunell/The Conversation CC-NY-BD
Leaves fall off trees when they aren’t doing their job any more. If there isn’t enough water, the leaf can be damaged and stop working.
In Australia you can have any tree you want, as long as it’s a eucalypt.
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Eucalypts have been in Australia for 45 million years. But hundreds of species appeared more recently than previously thought.
This guinea flower is called ‘fierce’ after its sharp, painful needles.
The Conversation/Shutterstock
The guinea flower grows right across Australia.
Amenic181/Shutterstock
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.
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Archaeologists have found cloves and black pepper corns they believe to be more than 1,000 years old at a site in Sri Lanka.
Some sneaky plants steal food instead of exclusively making their own.
Charlie Jackson/flickr
Since plants can’t pick up and move to greener pastures if conditions are tough, some have evolved interesting and sneaky strategies to make a living.
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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
There is good news for plant conservation in South Africa and internationally.
The Conversation
Sandpaper figs are the swiss army knife of Australian flora.
Flickr/Tatters/The Conversation
The Bunya pine is a unique and majestic Australian tree that commands respect.
A shepherd with his flock in the Netherlands.
Peter Nicolai
Humans have long been trying differentiate themselves from the rest of the biological world. Is it because we’re superior, or just insecure?
Flowers above, traps below.
Clyde Sorenson
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.