The Quiet Branches

Stories of Under-reported Science

How Does a Flower Come to be?

January 19, 2017

This is a re-post of a piece I wrote for the All Under One Leaf, the blog of the UK Plant Science Federation in August 2016. It is reposted here with permission. A flowering world There are around 369,000 known flowering plant species on Earth today, by far the most numerous group of plants living … More How Does a Flower Come to be?

Flowering time and genetic memory.

June 8, 2015

Flowering Flowering is a killer application of the natural world. There are 300,000 extant species of flowering plants, dwarfing any other type of plant. There are only several thousand species of other types of plants (about 15,000 mosses exist today– the next most abundant group of plants). To say flowers are an evolutionary success story … More Flowering time and genetic memory.