"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", said Shakespeare - who clearly hadn't met any botanists.

Human pollution of the seas is turning a gentle rain of food in the marine abyss into something nastier.

For Valentine's Day Nigel Chaffey finds a tale of an unlikely couple who have set up home together, though it ends in tears.

This week Nigel Chaffey finds he has a vision problem that needs more than a trip to the optician.

This week Nigel Chaffey finds a gentler way to kill a plant.

This week Nigel turns his dry wit on desert plants, and finds a cuticle full of charm.

This week Nigel Chaffey takes a closer look at mosses, the mighty colonisers of the land.

A recent spate of books – e.g. Daniel Chamovitz’s “What a plant knows”, Richard Karban’s “Plant Sensing & Communication”, and “Brilliant Green” by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola – have opened up our imaginations to the sensory capabilities of plants. In identifying plant equivalents of the five traditionally recognised human senses – touch, taste, hearing, […]

Nigel Chaffey discovers Pooh sticks might be a lot more serious than you realise.

You are all forgiven for doing a ‘double-take’ upon reading that headline. Usually it’s all bad news when humans and forests are concerned, so a statement to the contrary is noteworthy. The item concerns ancient humans, but is more convoluted and nuanced – Cuttingsesque…? – than that five word heading implies. Andrew Trant et al. […]

With all the hi-tech, whizzy methodology at our disposal nowadays you can be forgiven for thinking that we know all we need to know about plants. But, and I always find this realisation rather humbling, that is not the case; there is still a great deal we don’t yet know. And one of the most […]

One of the Grand Challenges – and, arguably, the Holy Grail – of plant research at present is an attempt to improve the photosynthetic efficiency of plants. Somewhat surprisingly, the fundamental photosynthetic pathway – which is the ultimate piece of biochemistry used by all plants to incorporate (‘fix’) carbon dioxide into organic molecules such as […]