Plants
- Plants
Sunflower genes don’t fit pattern
Comparison between crop and wild sunflower genes suggests that the plant followed an easy route to domestication.
- Plants
Why tulips can’t dance
An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.
- Plants
Recent tree scourge poses garden threat
Lab tests suggest that a lethal disease of oak trees in California and Oregon could strike some popular garden shrubs in the rhododendron family.
- Plants
Disease outpacing control in largest chestnut patch left
An unusual test of a biological control for the blight that's killing American chestnuts doesn't look good in the largest remaining patch.
- Plants
Bleeding Trees: Microbial suspect named in beech deaths
A microbe related to the one that caused the Irish potato famine may be killing majestic old beech trees in the northeastern United States.
- Plants
Mirror Image: Flowers with opposite styles have a fling
Scientists have discovered a gene that controls whether flowers lean to the left or the right.
- Plants
Trees dim the light on spring flowers
Early spring flowers and the sugar maples they grow under use different alarm clocks to get going in the spring, which can make life hard for the flowers in northern forests.
- Plants
Fringy flowers are hard to dunk
The fringe on the edges of the floating blooms of water snowflake flowers helps protect the important parts from getting drenched in dunkings.
- Plants
Tropical plants grow cool flowers
Tropical plants that position their flowers in the general direction of the sun are keeping the temperature comfortable for pollinators.
- Plants
Petite pollinators: Tree raises its own crop of couriers
A common tropical tree creates farms in its buds, where it raises its own work force of tiny pollinators.
- Plants
Shower power: Raindrops shoot seeds out with a splat
In a seed-dispersal mechanism scientists have never seen before in flowering plants, rain plops into a capsule and makes seeds shoot out the corners.
- Plants
Torn to Ribbons in the Desert
Botanists puzzle over one of Earth's oddest plants: the remarkably scraggly Welwitschia of southwestern Africa.
