Botany

New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, Chestnuts & Apples

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This spring, 160 chestnuts resulting from crosses made from large, standing American chestnut trees with natural blight resistance were planted at the botanic garden. Troy Thompson

Growing up in New England, apples and chestnuts were part of why autumn was my favorite season. During seven years living in walking distance of the Cornell orchards, apples remained a highlight of autumn well into adulthood. We have family who live in Boylston, so a visit to see this restoration project is now on my wish list. Thanks as always to Margaret Roach for all the gardens on that list:

At the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, in Boylston, Mass., the grafted heirloom apple trees are already big enough to bloom. But fruit isn’t expected for a few more years. New England Botanic Garden/Megan Stouffer

How Do You Restore a Chestnut Forest or an Apple Orchard? Very Slowly.

This botanic garden is determined to bring back the American chestnut tree and heirloom apples that taste like those grown 500 years ago. It won’t be easy.

“Explore what’s in bloom now,” exclaims a banner on the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill’s website. And, indeed, there is much to see. Continue reading →

Fungi & Brownfield Remediation

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Researcher Danielle Stevenson digs up California buckwheat grown at a brownfield site in Los Angeles.

Researcher Danielle Stevenson digs up California buckwheat grown at a brownfield site in Los Angeles. PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Corporate irresponsibility abounds, so brownfield sites are abundant. And fungi sometimes offer relevant remediation options. Thanks to Richard Schiffman and Yale e360 for this interview on a topic we have cared about since launching this platform, and which we believe will be of increasing importance in our future:

Turning Brownfields to Blooming Meadows, With the Help of Fungi

California buckwheat that has absorbed lead at a contaminated site in Los Angeles.

California buckwheat that has absorbed lead at a contaminated site in Los Angeles. PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Toxicologist Danielle Stevenson cleans up carbon-based pollutants and heavy metals from contaminated sites using fungi and plants. She’s also training environmental justice and tribal communities in using these methods so they can remediate toxic sites on their own.

The United States is dotted with up to a million brownfields — industrial and commercial properties polluted with hazardous substances. Continue reading →

Solar Arboreal Synchronicity

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Warm weather is one signal that guides the masting of beech trees, but now it appears that day length does more to determine the precise timing of the fruit release among European beeches.

We continue to enjoy learning about the communication between trees and this article from Quanta is an example why:

Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun

European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.

Each summer, like clockwork, millions of beech trees throughout Europe sync up, tuning their reproductive physiology to one another. Within a matter of days, the trees produce all the seeds they’ll make for the year, then release their fruit onto the forest floor to create a new generation and feed the surrounding ecosystem.

It’s a reproductive spectacle known as masting that’s common to many tree species, but European beeches are unique in theirability to synchronize this behavior on a continental scale. From England to Sweden to Italy — across multiple seas, time zones and climates — somehow these trees “know” when to reproduce. But how?

The recent discovery about European beech trees and the summer solstice was made by a team of researchers at Adam Mickiewicz University that included (from left to right) Jakub Szymkowiak, Michał Bogdziewicz and Valentin Journé, among others.

A group of ecologists has now identified the distinctive cue — what they call the “celestial starting gun” — that, along with balmy weather, triggers the phenomenon. Their analysis of over 60 years’ worth of seeding data suggests that European beech trees time their masting to the summer solstice and peak daylight.

Continue reading →

The Light Eaters, Reviewed As An Anthropology Of Science

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An illustration of a plant with central nervous system like tendrils coming out of the stem.We linked to this conversation with the author of The Light Eaters, and now see we can share this book excerpt published in The Atlantic:

On a freezing day in December 2021, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit Simon Gilroy’s lab. In one room of the lab sat a flat of young tobacco and Arabidopsis plants, each imbued with fluorescent proteins derived from jellyfish.

The excerpt came to our attention reading this book review by The New Yorker’s Rachel Riederer which, like the book excerpt, makes you wonder what became of David Rhoades (we searched and could find no trail to follow, so it remains a mystery to us). It reveals the book to be more of an anthropological study of science than just a primer on plant communication:

Illustration of a face made from plants in a fieldA New Book About Plant Intelligence Highlights the Messiness of Scientific Change

In “The Light Eaters,” by Zoë Schlanger, the field of botany itself functions as a character—one in the process of undergoing a potentially radical transformation.

During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, a researcher at the University of Washington started noticing something strange in the college’s experimental forest. Continue reading →

Garden Conservancy’s Open Days

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One of “the marquee gardens” welcoming the public during the Garden Conservancy Open Days belongs to the interior designer Bunny Williams, in Falls Village, Conn. Courtesy of Bunny Williams

Eleanor Briggs’s garden in New Hampshire, designed some 30 years ago by the landscape architect Diane McGuire, includes long borders that offer places for new must-have plants. Eleanor Briggs

Margaret Roach, a wealth of information on gardens, offers another option to salve the doom-scrolling. She provides this link to get more information on the Garden Conservancy’s open days:

Your Chance to Snoop: It’s ‘Open Days’ Season in the Garden

This year, more than 360 private gardens across the country are opening to visitors. Don’t miss your chance to learn from some of the best.

Ms. Briggs has opened her garden at Skatutakee Farm, her updated 18th-century home, numerous times since 2005. The next tour date is Aug. 24. Eleanor Briggs

I was at my station, a folding table dressed up with a burlap cloth, checking in visitors at a Garden Conservancy Open Days event maybe 10 years ago and answering questions from those who had already explored my garden, when I saw someone across the yard taking a photograph.

But of what, I wondered — what’s over there? There was nothing in that spot, I felt certain. Continue reading →

Brutalist Plants, Reviewed

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Les Étoiles d’Ivry, Paris, France. Architect: Jean Renaudie (Image credit: pp1 / Shuterstock)

Olivia Broome’s new book is reviewed in Wallpaper:

‘Brutalist Plants’ is a new monograph capturing the best of eco-brutalism

‘Brutalist Plants,’ the new book by Olivia Broome, captures concrete architecture engulfed with nature

‘Brutalist Plants’ is a new book featuring an impressive selection of imagery that captures the very best of the trend of ‘eco-brutalism’. This texture-rich movement has been gathering attention recently, focusing on brutalist architecture that has been – to varying degrees – embraced by flora, as planting engulfs entire structures, creating a calming concrete jungle for urban living. Continue reading →

The Light Eaters

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Thanks to Hanna Rosin, an Atlantic writer whose podcast conversation with this author brought the book above to my attention:

If Plants Could Talk

Some scientists are starting to reopen a provocative debate: Are plants intelligent?

When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother had a habit of singing arias to her houseplants. Continue reading →

How Much Communication Between Trees?

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Baobab trees in Madagascar.
Photograph: Dave Carr/Getty Images

Ancient oak trees in Glastonbury, Somerset. Photograph: Eddie Linssen/Alamy

I acknowledge my enthusiasm for the idea that there is something going on between trees. I always want to hear more about it. Those who know me well joke that I am anti-woo-woo; but this one topic betrays a soft spot for the as-yet not fully explained. So I am thankful to Daniel Immerwahr for reminding me of the boundaries of what we know (so far):

A bristlecone pine tree, one of the oldest living organisms on Earth. Photograph: Piriya Photography/Getty Images

Mother trees and socialist forests: is the ‘wood-wide web’ a fantasy?

In the past 10 years the idea that trees communicate with and look after each other has gained widespread currency. But have these claims outstripped the evidence?

There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying and occasionally sickening thought. Continue reading →

Oobli, Brazzein & Revolution In Sweetness

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In our extended family there are several cases of diabetes that have made me interested in sugar and its alternatives. Stevia came to my attention while working in Paraguay, when honey was my primary interest, because stevia is native to that place. Stevia is a taste of place product as much as any other we have come to share in our current work.

But neither stevia nor have any other so-called sugar alternatives have featured in our work. Still, this article by Yasmin Tayag in The Atlantic fits perfectly as a theme in our pages:

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic

A New Sweetener Has Joined the Ranks of Aspartame and Stevia

Unfortunately, it’s still nothing like real sugar.

A few months ago, my doctor uttered a phrase I’d long dreaded: Your blood sugar is too high. With my family history of diabetes, and occasional powerful cravings for chocolate, I knew this was coming and what it would mean: To satisfy my sweet fix, I’d have to turn to sugar substitutes. Ughhhh. Continue reading →

Forest Adaptation Via Scientific Methodology

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Scientists in northern Minnesota are exploring how to adapt forests for climate change, transitioning them to a warmer future by planting new mixes of southern seedlings. In this “transition test” in the Cutfoot Experimental Forest, forest ecologists thinned trees and planted seedlings of eight species, grown from seeds collected up to hundreds of miles to the south. CREDIT: BRIAN PALIK / USDA FOREST SERVICE

Thanks to John Tibbets and Knowable Magazine

This 8-year-old bitternut hickory, native to a milder climate to the south, is flourishing in northern Minnesota, notorious for long, intensely cold winters. CREDIT: BRIAN PALIK / USDA FOREST SERVICE

Moving trees north to save the forests

As the world warms, trees in forests such as those in Minnesota will no longer be adapted to their local climates. That’s where assisted migration comes in.

On a brisk September morning, Brian Palik’s footfalls land quietly on a path in flickering light, beneath a red pine canopy in Minnesota’s iconic Northwoods. A mature red pine, also called Norway pine, is a tall, straight overstory tree that thrives in cold winters and cool summers. It’s the official Minnesota state tree and a valued target of its timber industry.

But red pine’s days of dominance here could fade. In coming decades, climate change will make red pine and other Northwoods trees increasingly vulnerable to destructive combinations of longer, warmer summers and less extremely cold winters, as well as droughts, windstorms, wildfires and insect infestations. Climate change is altering ecological conditions in cold regions faster than trees can adapt or migrate. Continue reading →

Climate Change Challenges In Italy’s Food Basket

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The inside of a rice plant about to flower. With global heating, farmers fear extreme weather events such as drought will become more frequent

Thanks to Ottavia Spaggiari for this article, and to Marco Massa and Haakon Sand for the photos. We are closer to the challenges coffee faces in the context of climate change, but we know it is a global race to find solutions:

Risotto crisis: the fight to save Italy’s beloved dish from extinction

After drought devastated prized arborio and carnaroli harvests in the Po valley, new rice varieties offer a glimmer of hope. But none are yet suitable for use in the traditional recipe

Biometeorologist Marta Galvagno at work

For most of winter and spring in 2022, Luigi Ferraris, a 58-year-old rice farmer from Mortara, a town in the Po valley, remained hopeful. Rainfall had been down 40% in the first six months of the year, and snow had accumulated thinly in the Alps, prompting an 88% drop in the amount of water coming to the Po River from snow-melt; flow in the river and its connected canals was at a historic low. Continue reading →

Villa Triunfo, Old Farm & New School

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We have shared a few posts in these pages mentioning Villa Triunfo, but now we have designed a new label for it. So, time to celebrate that. What is most important to us about the farm is that it is one of the oldest continuously operating coffee farms in Costa Rica, since its first plantings in the late 1800s.

That, and the fact that today it is also one of the more innovative in terms of pioneering hybrids that help the coffee stay fit in the context of climate change and the various challenges (such as the uniquely problematic mold that is called rust). It is the end of harvest season, when coffees in the West Valley are being processed. The red honey process used for this coffee allows all the sugars from the juicy fruit to absorb into the beans. We look forward to cupping it soon.

Phototropism Better Understood

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Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani

Our thanks to Asher Elbein, writing in The Atlantic, for this:

The Secret of Plant ‘Sight’

Scientists have discovered that a mysterious behavior might come down to air.

On a shelf lined with terra-cotta pots, herbs bend their stems toward the nearest window. In a field of golden wildflowers, leaves rotate with the path of the sun. In a dappled forest, vines twine up trees, reaching ever upward and away from the dark. Continue reading →

Kew Gardens & New Species

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Cochlospermum adjanyae, a flowering plant that grows mostly underground and was first recorded by scientists in Angola in 2023. STEVE BOYES

Thanks to Yale e360:

Ten Curious New Plants and Fungi Recorded in 2023

Aeranthes bigibbum. JOHAN HERMANS / RBG KEW

As the planet warms and extinctions mount, scientists are racing to catalog the vast array of life on Earth before species disappear. This year, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, recorded 89 new species of plant and fungi across the globe, from the rocky edges of Antarctica to a dormant volcano in Indonesia.

Baphia arenicola.

Baphia arenicola. DAVID GOYDER / RBG KEW

“It is an incredibly exciting time to be a scientist, but even as we make these wonderful new discoveries, we must remember that nature is under threat, and we have the power to do something about it,” Martin Cheek, a senior researcher with Kew, said in a statement. Continue reading →

Newly Revised For Planting Plans

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Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture

The topics of what to plant, when to plant, where to plant are constantly with us in Costa Rica.  Thanks to Julia Simon at National Public Radio (USA) for this note on gardeners in the USA using an online resource to rethink their planting plans:

‘It feels like I’m not crazy.’ Gardeners aren’t surprised as USDA updates key map

A newly updated government map has many of the nation’s gardeners rushing online, Googling what new plants they can grow in their mostly warming regions. Continue reading →

Future Fruits & Vegetables

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The Cheery line of cherries has been developed to do well even if temperatures rise. BLOOM FRESH

Agricultural adaptation to a changing climate has caught our attention frequently with regard to wine grapes. Thanks to Kim Severson for this look at other fruits and vegetables:

Hot-weather cherries, drought-resistant melons and six other crops in the works that could change how we eat in a fast-warming world.

The Cosmic Crisp was bred at the University of Washington with a changing climate in mind. Credit…Ines Hanrahan/Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission

Plant breeders, by nature, are patient people. It can take them years or even decades to perfect a new variety of fruit or vegetable that tastes better, grows faster or stays fresh longer.

But their work has taken on a new urgency in the face of an increasingly erratic climate. Recent floods left more than a third of California’s table grapes rotting on the vine. Too much sunlight is burning apple crops. Pests that farmers never used to worry about are marching through lettuce fields.

Breeding new crops that can thrive under these assaults is a long game. Continue reading →

Braiding Sweetgrass

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My daily news scanning, reading and listening diet are fairly omnivorous, but I am constantly reminded of how much I miss. This sounds like a book I should have read in 2015 when it was first published, but instead I only heard about it this morning. Listening to the author talk about it, I learned that she lives where I lived when I was a boy, in a region where my family history is partly rooted; the same region where I spent seven years to get to an idea that has guided my work ever since; where both our sons and our grand daughter were born. Which is to say, as she talks about nature in that conversation, I know that particular nature. Which is to say, I will find this book.

 

Carl Linnaeus, The Man Who Organized Nature

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Thanks to Kathryn Schulz for this review:

The sexual system Linnaeus favored for classifying plants brought a whiff of scandal, which helped spread his name. Illustration by Karlotta Freier

How Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life

He sorted and systematized and coined names for more than twelve thousand species. What do you call someone like that?

For the Tyrannosaurus rex, as for Elvis and Jesus, being extremely dead has proved no obstacle to ongoing fame. Last seen some sixty-six million years ago, before an asteroid wiped out three-quarters of the life-forms on earth, it is nonetheless flourishing these days, thanks in large part to Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and elementary-school children all over the world. Continue reading →

Among The Reasons To Regenerate Soil

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Organikos soil regeneration view from above, early Tuesday morning

When we started the berm where the sugarcane grows now, we knew we had a multi-year project ahead of us. This morning, before the sun had risen enough to shine on the land, I snapped the photo above, looking down on the acreage where we have planted more than 100 trees to provide shade for coffee we will plant in the near future. Besides all that, plenty of good ideas for how and why to regenerate the quality of the soil on that land; here’s some more:

A springtail crawls over snail eggs. ANDY MURRAY

Nearly Two-Thirds of All Species Live in the Ground, Scientists Estimate

Soils are more rich in life than coral reefs or rainforest canopies, providing a home to nearly two-thirds of all species, according to a sprawling new analysis. Continue reading →