Plants

A tree’s fall palette offers a glimpse at its health and the weather it has experienced in a given year

A curator at the New York Botanical Garden explains what we can learn about the past and the present from houseplant trends.

A bioluminescent petunia led me to a world of radiant mushrooms, 19th-century experiments and a modern rivalry between scientists in Russia and the Americas

A tall cactus found only in Florida’s Key Largo is the U.S.’s first species to go extinct from sea-level rise

Historian and ecologist Laura J. Martin rediscovers the female scientists who established ecological restoration in her book Wild by Design

Zoë Schlanger’s new book The Light Eaters explores the surprising science of plant intelligence.

A small South Pacific fern boasts more than 50 times as many base pairs as the human genome

Plants are just trying to reproduce; immune systems are just trying to keep us safe

In a new book, the wisdom of plants is a balm for our changing planet

The Morris sisters made significant contributions to botany and entomology, but their stories were erased from the history of early American science, both accidentally and by design.

A humble thistle blossom in southern Spain somehow keeps itself up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the surrounding air

The engineered “firefly petunia” emits a continuous green glow thanks to genes from a light-up mushroom