Kiyoshi Mabuchi et al. won an award at the 24th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 2014, for their work investigating ‘why bananas are slippery’.

This study of the fossilised stem of a royal fern in Lahar deposits from Korsaröd in Scania includes cellular details that are ‘exquisitely preserved’.

A study shows coral polyps actively generate micro-currents and eddies to promote nutrient inflow and exchange of materials using externally located cilia.

Whilst it is claimed that only the taxman can get blood out of a stone, it seems that some plants can abstract water from stone-like minerals. Arguably, ahead of light, water is the most important abiotic factor that plants need and obtain from the environment. Although water is essential to plant life, it is not […]

Do you remember the good old days when students read for a degree? Well, I don’t know how much proper reading they do these days – i.e. that which involves actually touching and turning the pages of a book or research article (but which is probably nowadays forbidden on health and safety grounds – well, […]

There is an ancient and time-honoured association – maybe co-evolution even – between birds and flowering plants, e.g. in respect of pollination and dispersal of the fruits/seeds of the latter by the former. Now, at the other end of the evolutionary spectrum of the Plant Kingdom, is news of another avian–Plantae link-up as Lily Lewis […]

We’d like to congratulation two recently appointed plant-biological Fellows of the Royal Society: Professor Liam Dolan FRS and Professor David Beerling FRS.

One of the most unusual plant-based items that has come to my notice recently is this rather ‘quirky’ item that sheds a forensic botany light on an episode of ‘regicide à la française’ when King Louis XVI had an unfortunate appointment with Madame la Guillotine. Big issues of whether mere mortals have the right to execute […]

Crowdfunding is being used to help sequence the genome of Azolla filiculoides by a team fromProfessor Kathleen Pryer’s Seed-Free Vascular Plants laboratory.

Scientific Data: an open-access, online-only journal for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets, to help publish, discover & reuse research data.

No, this is not an item about M People, an ‘English house music band which formed in 1990 and achieved success throughout most of the 1990s’, nor about using profane language… Anyway, how would any of that be relevant to a straitlaced, sober, serious botanical news round-up that is the hallmark of a P. Cuttings item? […]

It just had to happen, but we didn’t know it would take nearly 150 years to come to fruition. And fruition is an apt word because the creation of a new botanical journal has recently been announced by the publishers behind Nature, the world’s premier general science journal. Imaginatively entitled Nature Plants, this new organ is […]