Sadly, we don’t have time machines that would permit us to go back and see ancient evolution in action. So we have to make do with such devices and stratagems as inference, surmise, speculation, good honest-to-goodness old-fashioned guesswork, and investigating modern-day equivalents that might mimic the original phenomenon. Take for instance colonisation of the land [...]

How does a rooted-to-the-spot plant escape the attentions of would-be herbivores? Well, according to Kazuo Yamazaki in his review straightforwardly entitled ‘Gone with the wind: trembling leaves may deter herbivory’, they move, and rather rapidly, too! No, they don’t run away, but by employing rapid – though passive – movements, such as the wind-induced trembling [...]

Traditionally, 14th February – Saint Valentine’s Day – is the day when lovers bear their souls and declare their love for one another, often accompanied by gifts (‘inducements’, bribes…?) of flowers, chocolates, maybe even jewellery. However, such is the power of plants, oftentimes you can probably ‘get away’ with just flowers (after all, rose is an [...]

This column is always fascinated by the way new insights arise when different disciplines are brought together to tackle an ostensibly botanical problem. So, too, is the UK’s Royal Society, hence its august organ entitled Journal of the Royal Society Interface, a ‘cross-disciplinary publication promoting research at the interface between the physical and life sciences’ [...]

It must be terribly depressing if you don’t have plants in your life to give you purpose and a reason to get up in the morning, put digit to keyboard, or whatever. Still, for those who are intellectually botanically bereft, there is always one plant-derived stimulant or another to fill the void. And most of [...]