Plants

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.

Plants

Lichen Lovelies

Should anyone dismiss lichens as so much gray-green crust, send the detractor to the lichen glamour shots in this Web site’s portrait gallery. The lush photography details shapes from goblets to anchors and colors from blue to neon Lycra-pants lemon. Other images illustrate the importance of lichens for other creatures (see the flying squirrel nest) […]

Plants

The bladderwort: No ruthless microbe killer

A carnivorous plant called a bladderwort may not be a fierce predator at all but a misunderstood mutualist.

Plants

Dead pipes can still regulate plants’ water

Physiologists say they have demonstrated for the first time that dead xylem cells in plant plumbing can control water speed.