People loves bees, but their cousins the wasps often provoke a far less friendly reaction. The much-maligned insects often inspire fear, disgust or even the “kill it with fire” response.
A pristine garden can come with an environmental cost. The chemicals we use to kill weeds and bugs rely on fossil fuels, and can disrupt local wildlife.
- Jen Frey By
Plants make this amazing, wonderful, fantastic planet livable. Among many gifts, they provide the oxygen that we need to breathe.
A honey bee’s life depends on it successfully harvesting nectar from flowers to make honey. Deciding which flower is most likely to offer nectar is incredibly difficult.
Here are the unexpected risks and hazards that gardening can pose to your health and safety. Learn how to protect yourself and stay safe while enjoying your favorite outdoor hobby.
Dive into the fascinating world of bees and discover their incredible abilities to learn, remember, and make decisions. Explore their unique sensory experiences and vital role in pollination.
I’d say most potted orchid deaths arise from drowned roots. Conversely, I’ve seen people desiccate cacti believing they don’t need water.
Poppies can be a problem for crops if they appear in large numbers. We informally call them weeds, but what are they really and how bad are they?
New research shows your plants could be silently screaming at you.
One new idea that’s gaining attention is the concept of food forests – essentially, edible parks.
- Nick Goltz By
Here are four trends I’ve seen online recently that have stood out as being especially misleading or potentially damaging to plants.
It’s garden season, which means gardeners are beginning to enjoy their homegrown vegetables. However, for those who live in cities, urban life can reinforce the idea that gardens are a bonus, maybe a hobby, but not a necessity of life.
Nearly all of Earth’s organisms communicate with each other in one way or another, from the nods and dances and squeaks and bellows of animals, through to the invisible chemical signals emitted by plant leaves and roots. But what about fungi?
It’s not as easy being a squirrel as you might think. They live a relatively solitary life guarding hard-won food stores to survive the tough winters
Gardening should be thought of as a public health need, one that could serve communities in future pandemics or disasters. We need to change the narrative of how urban gardening is framed and elevate it to a key strategy for both environmental and public health
New research shows how regenerative farming practices—soil-building techniques that minimize plowing, use cover crops, and plant diverse crops—affect the nutritional content of the food.
Flowers are one of the most striking examples of diversity in nature, displaying myriad combinations of colours, patterns, shapes and scents. They range from colourful tulips and daisies, to fragrant frangipani and giant, putrid-smelling corpse flowers.
Plants are flowering about a month earlier in the UK due to climate change. That’s according scientists at the University of Cambridge, who recently analysed the first flowering dates of 406 species and found a link to warmer temperatures in spring.
Peat has been a staple ingredient of composts sold in British garden centres since the 1960s, even though it’s not actually that nutritious for plants.
To survive on land, plants had to protect themselves from UV radiation and develop spores and later seeds which allowed them to disperse more widely. These innovations helped plants become one of the most influential lifeforms on Earth.
Here are five ways of using your garden that research suggests can improve your mental health. If you have access to an outdoor space and have been finding things difficult, you could try these out to boost your mood.
During lockdowns, millions of homes were transformed into mini schools as parents and teachers joined forces to facilitate remote learning. The experience proved education doesn’t only happen in classrooms.
As an herbalist I have a very different view of weeds than the average gardener who can’t abide common garden weeds such as nettle, dandelion and plantain. These plants and many more of our garden weeds are nutritious and full of minerals and beneficial medicinal properties.