The Week in Botany October 5, 2026

Announcing that the videos would start without a plan seemed like a good idea to give me a deadline to hit. Next door's gardeners were gone, giving me a clear run. What I didn't know was that another near neighbour had decided to replace their drive, which led to a lot of pneumatic drilling. This killed any chance of filming. So, by Wednesday, I was not in a sunny mood.

There's one video out this week, and the goal is to get to three a week initially. I'm not planning to link to the early ones, as they're practice and are not going to be great. They're also being written up as social media threads and then being compiled into short blog posts, which look better. Things I've learned this week include that I really don't cope well with bright light, so I might need sunglasses to film simply to avoid squinting at the camera.

I can't be sure I'll hit the target of three a week, but I can say there will be another email sharing what we've posted, as well as the stories you're sharing on Mastodon and Bluesky, and career postings at the usual time.

Until then, take care,

Alun (webmaster@botany.one)

On Botany One

Travelling Far Does Not Mean Living Long for Moss Spores
A new study shows that moss spore longevity depends strongly on developmental stage and storage conditions, with important consequences for dispersal and establishment.

Night Gardeners and Sticky Bottoms: The Unlikely Mistletoe Dispersers of Madagascar
A study in the rainforests of Madagascar reveals that the primary dispersers of mistletoe are not birds, but two small nocturnal lemurs that help disperse seeds using a technique as eccentric as it is effective.

Humans Have a Profound Impact on Urban Biodiversity
Urbanization leads to a 50:50 ratio of native to non-native plant species.

Salt, Flowers and Bees
Salt stress did not change pollen or bee visitation, while the number of open flowers remained as the strongest factor to attract bees.

A familiar weed may be more diverse than we thought
The common weed Sonchus asper may actually contain several distinct evolutionary groups that can be revealed by studying both its traits and DNA.

• Why does a wound feel like winter?

There was also Science Shared, Sudoku Garden celebrated National Foundation Day for Korea, and Thelymitra matthewsii was plant of the week. You can also see last week's Week in Botany too.

In AoBC Publications

• Integrated phenotyping reveals coordinated physiological responses to cold, freezing and recovery in Ramonda resurrection plants
• Optimising the specific adaptation of sorghum in variable water-limited environments in Australia
• Deceptive Aristolochia Trap-Flowers Pollinated by Male Phorid Flies Mimic Volatiles Specific to Female Phorids
  

News & Views

‘You can taste the land’: the Somerset farmer bringing wildflowers back to cheddar
Tom Calver has sacrificed milk yields to give his cows a more varied diet of plants and believes the result is better cheese and richer farmland.
theguardian.com

Herbaria Meet Citizen Science (+”Weird Plant” Talk!): A Conversation with Adam Schneider - A Botanical Podcast
Herbaria are amazing libraries of plant biodiversity—they serve as time capsules of a particular time and place, but they are also so much more! Listen in on this conversation between our podcast host and Adam Schneider, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, as they discuss their love of plant collections and how herbaria and iNaturalist (a social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe) complement each other. 
buzzsprout.com

Wildflowers For All Seasons – Gardening Solutions
Florida’s native wildflowers will bring a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes to your landscape. They can take the heat, thrive in humidity, require little maintenance, and come back year after year.
gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu

When aspen trees experience drought, their leaf cells change shape
The surface of an aspen leaf looks like a jigsaw puzzle under the microscope. Researchers at Umeå Plant Science Centre have now identified a gene that helps shape these interlocking cells – and discovered that both the gene's activity and the cells' shape change when the tree experiences drought.
upsc.se

Wildlife arrives on time at rewilded chalk grasslands built along HS2 route
The trains may be running late, but the Western Slopes project is already attracting birds and insects on lands around the high-speed railway
theguardian.com

Oxygen: A hidden developmental cue in leaf morphogenesis
Oxygen is always considered something living forms need to survive. But wait, its role is beyond just respiration. Would you believe if I told you oxygen guides the development of young leaves?
plantae.org

Anne S. Chatham Fellowship in Medicinal Botany
The Garden Club of America’s Anne S. Chatham Fellowship in Medicinal Botany provides at least one grant award of $4,500 annually to support a one-year research project related to medicinal plants. In recent years, three to four awards have been made per year.
botany.org

How a desert alga helps us understand plants’ adaptability to extreme environmental conditions
A single-celled green alga from the sand dunes of the Negev Desert has, within just a few years, become a key model organism in modern photosynthesis research. Chlorella ohadii helps researchers better understand plants’ adaptability to extreme environmental conditions. These findings could help make crops more resilient to heat, drought, and other consequences of climate change in the future.
rptu.de

Are plant-pollinator interactions more specialised in the tropics? A new global analysis suggests that it’s complicated…
Some scientific questions have a habit of following you around for much of your career. Back in 2002, Louise Cranmer and I published a paper in the journal Oikos asking a deceptively simple question: are tropical plants more specialised in terms of their pollinators?
jeffollerton.co.uk

‘Like caring for a pet’: the open-source tree map inspiring Berliners to water their urban forest
Gieß den Kiez app shows trees in critical need of watering and can be adopted by other heat-stressed cities around the world.
theguardian.com

Science Shared

Three botany papers widely shared on Bluesky this past week were:

1. NO VEIN is an ancestral immunity protein involved in plant-virus interaction
Lågeide, E. et al. · bioRxiv · 2 posts · 83 likes · 48 reposts on Bluesky

Here we show that NO VEIN (NOV), a plant protein previously characterized for its essential developmental roles in Arabidopsis thaliana, shares domain composition and structural similarity with Tiamat, a bacterial antiphage protein.

2. Stepwise evolution of the developmental and symbiotic functions of DELLA in land plants
Melkonian, K. et al. · New Phytologist · 2 posts · 44 likes · 33 reposts on Bluesky

In flowering plants, DELLA (named after a conserved amino acid motif containing Aspartate (D), Glutamate (E), Leucine (L), Leucine (L), and Alanine (A)) proteins are GIBBERELLIN INSENSITIVE, REPRESSOR OF GA1-3, and SCARECROW (GRAS) transcription factors and play multiple functions mediated by the plant hormone gibberellin (GA).

3. Divergence in wilt tolerance across the range of Mimulus guttatus in the absence of stomatal regulation
Branch, H. A. et al. · bioRxiv · 4 posts · 56 likes · 18 reposts on Bluesky

Whether phenotypes and environments predict performance under stress is central to ecology and evolution and can reveal species' vulnerability to global change. We sampled Mimulus guttatus range-wide to test whether reproductive, morphological, and physiological traits predict drought responses. Surprisingly, we find that stomatal response, a key mediator of water balance, did not change as drought intensified.

You can see the full list with more details at Science Shared: October 3.

Careers on Bluesky

Please note these are not jobs I am offering. Nor can I help you with any visa requirements. At time of writing there are around 50 other jobs posted at Botany One.

Cover Image: Immature sporophyte of Funaria hygrometrica. By Christopher Stephens (iNaturalist, CC BY-SA 4.0).