We are told that the future’s bright, the future’s orange. If true, that’s rather monochrome, and drab, and sad. So, what better time to celebrate a more colourful – and botanical! – past (and one which might also help to make the future a little more polychrome)? Take, for instance, illuminated manuscripts, such as the […]

Mulberry by Peter Coles 2019. Reaktion Books Ltd. Arguably, the only thing you need to know about Mulberry by Peter Coles is that it’s a title in Reaktion Books’ Botanical series. Anyone who’s read my book appraisals should know what I think of that brilliant series of plant-based texts. For a reminder, please see my […]

Plants go to war: A botanical history of World War II by Judith Sumner, 2019. McFarland & Co. Lest there be any doubt at the outset, this blog item is an appraisal of a book that looks at the role of plants in wartime: It doesn’t deal with the myriad marvellous ways that plants defend […]

This is the last of our quartet of blog posts looking at the newsworthy world of the blue-greens, and looks at those organisms from a different viewpoint… Cyanobacteria lighting the way for fossil fuel alternatives In an environment where light levels are reduced by atmospheric pollution blocking out the sun – such as the situation […]

This is the third of our quartet of posts looking at the newsworthy world of the blue-greens. Asteroids, bad for dinosaurs, but good for cyanobacteria? This really good news for cyanobacteria – both benign and bad blue-green species – comes from investigation into the consequences of the Chicxulub asteroid. This is the Yucatán Peninsula (in […]

Continuing our look at the newsworthy world of the blue-greens. DOM, a double-edged sword … From a bad news point of view – bad for those ‘BBGs’ (bad blue-greens [URL for Part I]), but good for the rest of us – is work by Amanda Neilen et al. (2019) that looks at the effect of […]

This is the first of what is hoped to be a series in which Mr P. Cuttings looks at a group of organisms and tries to decide whether they’ve had a good week, or a bad week. And by way of increasing the intrigue this initial instalment will be published as four separate blog posts, […]

Vickery’s Folk Flora: An A-Z of the Folklore and Uses of British and Irish Plants by Roy Vickery, 2019. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. For the past several weeks I’ve been tackling Rebecca Armstrong’s Vergil’s Green Thoughts. What a contrast it was to now be looking at Vickery’s Folk Flora by Roy Vickery. Its sub-title The A-Z […]

Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine by Rebecca Armstrong, 2019. Oxford University Press. When I first heard about Vergil’s Green Thoughts by Rebecca Armstrong, I was eager to obtain a review copy since it seemed to me to deal with matters of plants and people relevance, which deserved to be shared and promoted […]

The Extraordinary Story of the Apple by Barrie E. Juniper and David J. Mabberley 2019. Kew Publishing. Having recently read Robert Spengler’s Fruits from the sands (and Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire several years ago), I have some idea of the importance of the apple in the affairs of humankind. But, at best, those books […]

Fruit from the sands: The Silk Road origins of the food we eat by Robert N Spengler III, 2019. University of California Press. In the UK we are blessed with a wide variety and ready availability of fruits all year round in our shops. So commonplace and taken-for-granted is that, I suspect we rarely give […]

School lessons devoted to plants may be off-putting to those students who are already plant-averse. So, why not smuggle bits of plant information into lessons on topics as diverse as Geography, History, Art & Design, and Computing to show how relevant plants are?