Flower

South African botanist Brian du Preez has discovered a beautiful new species from the Iridaceae family high up in the Langeberg Mountains of the Western Cape, South Africa.

You're probably familiar with the sight of a lillipilly bush. This hardy Australian staple—a glossy evergreen bearing powder-puff flowers and clusters of bright berries—features in many a garden hedge.

The microbiome is the collection of microbes that colonize a habitat, human body or otherwise. Because of pioneering microbiome research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, people around the world now understand much more about the fundamental role of gut microbes in human health and disease.

Over the past decades, rising levels of ozone pollution have been interrupting pollination, impacting the livelihood of both plants and the animals that pollinate them. In a review published September 29 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, researchers explain how an excess of ground-level ozone can damage plant foliage, change plants' flowering patterns, and act as a barrier to pollinators finding blooms.

Within the cabinets and drawers of the world's herbaria are nearly 400 million dried plant specimens. These collections have long served as a vital record of what plant species exist on Earth and where they grow. But hidden within the desiccated leaves, stems, flowers and roots is far more information on how the plants interacted with their environment while they were alive. Knowing about these "functional traits"—aspects like leaf structure, chemical composition and water content—could […]

Spring has arrived in Australia's Snowy Mountains. The snow is starting to melt. Wildflowers are emerging in a variety of colors: blues, yellows, whites … hang on. Those aren't white flowers. They're scrunched up bits of toilet paper left behind by skiers, boarders and snow-shoers.

Researchers at the University of Freiburg have found that hedges and perennial flower strips are complementary in supporting wild bees in orchards by providing continuous resources over the growing season. The results are published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.

In 2012, a crop of California's most prized ornamental trees was overrun by an invisible invader. The growing shoots of coral beans—the official city tree of Los Angeles—began wilting and falling away, revealing stems that had been hollowed out from the inside by the caterpillars of Erythrina stem borer moths.

Researchers from Uppsala University and elsewhere have been studying the effect of rising temperatures on the lifespan of pollinating fig wasps. The findings show that the wasps lived much shorter lives at high temperatures, which would make it difficult for them to travel the long distances between the trees they pollinate.

On the wooded hill above the Stan Terg lead and zinc mine in Kosovo, there is an old concrete diving platform looming over what was once an open-air swimming pool. Before the break-up of Yugoslavia, people who worked at the mine would bring their families here to swim, sunbathe on the wide terrace with its view across the valley, and picnic among the trees. Now the pool is slowly disappearing into the forest, the view obscured by birch saplings.