The Week in Botany
The Week in Botany June 15, 2026
This week: Tools for digital botany, secret photosynthesis and the shifting habitats of state flowers.
Plant of the Week
Turfgrass
From golf to tennis to football, turfgrass is specially bred for a variety of sports
Puzzles
Plant Hunt
⚽ From Africa to North America
Science Shared
Science Shared: June 13
This week: plant immunity, gall production, and improvements to Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation.
Puzzles
Sudoku Garden
Peter Raven
Digital Botany Focus Issue
Three Tools That Bring Digital Botany Within Reach
Millions of herbarium specimens are now only a click away. But how do botanists find the right records, sort the right images and train better AI tools? Three digital botany tools are helping turn online collections into usable knowledge.
Plants & People
Will State Flowers and Insects Leave Home?
State flowers and insects are meant to represent a place, but climate change may soon test how long those living emblems can remain in place.
Digital Botany Focus Issue
Lights, Camera, Action! Behind the lens of Kew’s mass herbarium digitisation project
Anyone with a smartphone probably has a camera roll of images waiting to be sorted through. Now imagine you have millions of images to process, and
Growth & Development
The Secret Photosynthesis Inside Seeds
A new method reveals that developing barley seeds run their own form of photosynthesis, distinct from the familiar process in leaves.
Digital Botany Focus Issue
Heather Cole: Best Tricks, Equipment and Software for Digitisation
Everyone knows that it is important to have the right tools for the job, whether collecting plants in the field for scientific research or cooking them
The Week in Botany
The Week in Botany June 8, 2026
This week: the first week of our Focus Issue on Digital Botany, perfumes to save endangered species, plus urban byrophytes and lichens.
Plant of the Week
Vellozia sessilis
Once known from only two sites in Brazil’s rocky Cerrado highlands, Vellozia sessilis is now helping show how fieldwork and citizen science can protect microendemic plants.