Two new books on healing plants

This versatile and beautiful plant has become even more fascinating to gardeners and botanists alike. Check out the Best New Zealand Flax Varieties in this article that offer unique colors, textures, and growth habits.

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Grow these Best European Houseplants if you wish to add some variety to your houseplant collection.

Invasive Plant Species in New York pose a significant ecological challenge. These non-native plants disrupt local ecosystems, outcompete native species, and threaten biodiversity.

I SAW NEWS of a new book called “Pressed Plants” recently, and it got me thinking about my grandmother and one of the many crafts she enjoyed way back when. Grandma made what she called “pressed-flower pictures,” bits of her garden that she carefully dried, arranged on fabric and framed under glass. And some of those still hang on my walls. It also got me thinking of the 500-year-old tradition of pressing plants for science and the herbarium world.

Yesterday I read that Trump adviser Myron Ebell, a climate change denier, thinks that the green movement is the greatest threat to freedom.

I’m not a chemist, but I do find plant chemistry (and the links and patterns between different plants) to be a fascinating topic. Fortunately there are chemists out there who can bring these to our attention, and Compound Interest includes some great plant-related infographics amongst a wider spread of chemical topics.

We half-finished the back garden last year, in that we installed and planted half of the raised beds. In truth, we did a lot more than half, as we had all of the paving done and installed the two sheds. But the wet weather over the winter stalled progress, and it has remained unfinished. It has been frustrating, but has become even more so since the sowing season arrived and I faced the fact that the plants I wanted to grow this year had no home to go to. And so it is with great excitement that I can say that weather, time and energy coincided over the weekend, and we have broken new ground!

Everywhere I go lately, I seem to be tripping over the idea of allelopathy. The amaranths in the picture above might look like pretty, harmless and useful plants – but they’re hiding a darker secret. During our class field trip to the Eden Project in December I discovered that they produce chemicals that can inhibit the growth of other plants nearby. This is allelopathy – chemical warfare that gives plants a competitive edge over their neighbours.

Part of my dissertation involved immersing myself in the history of plants that have been adopted as crops outside their country of origin – novel crops, as I referred to them. It’s a long history, with recorded attempts to move plants from one place to another going back as far as the ancient Egyptians. Even before that, probably for as long as we’ve been human, we have been moving plants around, whether by accident or design.

COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change, has ended with a ‘landmark’ agreement that climate change is something we all need to tackle together. Last week I was talking about what gardeners can do to reduce their carbon footprint, and a lot of it is about being thrifty with resources – something that tends to come naturally to us! Over the weekend, Ryan has done his bit by recycling plastic plant pots in my direction. He came across a newly landscaped commercial building, where the unwanted plant pots were being discarded.

With my bookshelf groaning under the weight of unread review books, I have declared an emergency Reading Week. Reading Week at university is a bit like half term – the lecturers get a week off teaching, and the students are supposed to use it to catch up on their reading list. When I went back to uni to do my Masters I dreamed of spending a lot of time reading, with the wealth of the university library on hand. The reality was there was never any time to ready anything that wasn’t immediately essay-related, which was a shame.