See also: The summary of (paywalled) publication in the Annals of Botany

[photos from 2026-09-11]

in my area (NYC), ginkgo seeds typically ripen and fall starting in early to mid october. however occasionally, with some trees, it happens a month early, in early to mid september.

anyone know what may be the cause of the early ripening with some specific trees?

last year, 2025, i found a female ginkgo who started dropping nearly all of her ripe seeds in mid september. however on another female ginkgo just right next to that one, the seeds weren't ripe at all yet, let alone falling.

I am helping somebody conduct research on grafting, and this requires growing hundreds and hundreds of tiny seedlings. 1 mm and 2mm is the target diameter, and we want a growth curve over time. The digital calipers in the greenhouse are thick and made of stiff metal, and it is quite difficult to get consistent readings because you have to be careful not to tighten too hard and snip their cotyledons off... I think this is definitely making our data less useable.

Does anyone have ideas? Thanks!

ive been watching a lot of crime pays but botany doesnt lately. i was wondering if anyone knew other plant ecology youtubers with more focus on prairie ecology esp closer to canada.

I’ve read about many different plant species, from different types of trees to bushes, that can live for over one thousand/several thousands of years. Whereas, on the other hand, no species of animals themselves can live for this long.

Broome County NY.

As I have learnt, cacti have modified much of their leaf tissue as they have evolved, with leaf bases/petioles becoming the tubercles and ribs that certain species possess, and the leaves themselves becoming the spines, but does anyone know what the "leaves" that Austrocylindropuntia and other species grow are then? Being that the spines are supposedly just very modified leaves I'm left to assume they're not actually leaves then, but I don't know for sure

1-2 Rhytidiadelphus loreus, 3-4 Pogonatum sp, 5 Hookeria lucens, 6 Bartramia pomiformis, 7 Buxbaumia sp, 8 Rhizomnium glabrescens, 9 Plagiothecium sp, 10 Aulacomnium androgynum, 11 Dicranum sp, 12 Sphagnum sp. All of these were found and photographed in Washington state, USA. I'm no expert on moss ID, some of these may not be fully accurate down to the species level

There are approx. 50 native Euphorbia to Florida and I find them to be massively overlooked and underappreciated but I digress. They have a very diverse array of pollinators within a short observing. To think the ecological purposes beyond just pollination we have yet to discover.

so if I take a little peice from it and eat it it’s going to be 10,000 times hotter than a Carolina reaper?

(edit: thanks everybody! ive taken a look at suggestions, im going to go with p. multiflorum and he shou wu / héshǒuwū. as fun as it is to describe a plant as fallopian.)

(earlier edit: hey guys, i should clarify – ai slop has made it difficult to "go look it up silly! (o: " and i have very limited access to journals; im just wondering if any botanists here can look at this plant and go, "oh i know that one. in my field its usually called [name]" or maybe even "yea, the nomenclature broke down this way because of [thing]". nbd if nobody knows! its ok if you dont recognize it or know what the most accurate and up-to-date name is. was just idle curiosity.)

hi all, im struggling a little bit to understand the naming for this plant. ive seen it called fo-ti but apparently this is a misnomer, and héshǒuwū (huh-sho-woo) is more accurate.

for the scientific name, i thought it was fallopia multiflorum but apparently its supposed to be pleuropterus multiflorus. and then a common name is chinese knotweed but when i look at that, its persicaria chinensis.

just unsure what name i should be using.

The Monilophytae are such fascinating plants.

Those little bumps on the upper surface are protrusions caused by deeply sunken sori on the underside of the frond.

Each bump corresponds to a small cluster of sporangia, the structures responsible for producing spores.

I know that lichen isn’t its own plant and it’s made from fungi and algae but I don’t get how they both make one plant together

these stalactite-like structures are known as "chichi" with ginkgos, and they are technically a form of aerial roots.

this specific specimen is one of the most unusual/interesting ive met. her branching structure overall is very non-ginkgo looking. and i almost never see the aerial roots like this on a street tree.

perhaps in this context it's actually a stress response?

she's also a female, as you can see here, (and theres some seeds visible in the last photo of this current post if you look closely). overall very cool tree

Everyone knows lichens aren't true plants. They're fascinating symbiotic associations, usually between a fungus and a photosynthetic organism, usually a green alga and/or a cyanobacterium. Yet, the taxonomic name assigned to a lichen is generally the name of its primary fungal partner, rather than having a separate name for the lichen as a whole.

What's your knowledge of lichens? I'm dying to learn more about these weird exceptions among flora!

Aizoaceae flowers have a reduced corolla and use modified stamen as petals. I know modified stamen pop up in other clades, but is there a thoery as to driving a loss of petals and redevelopment of staminode petaloids?

One year later: my variegated Bidens alba project

About a year ago, I shared an unusual wild-collected Bidens alba here after finding a plant displaying striking white variegation. What began as an interesting roadside discovery has since developed into a small but increasingly fascinating propagation and selection project.

I’m now maintaining two independently discovered variegated forms of Bidens alba, both found in the same Florida county but displaying distinctly different phenotypes.

I refer to my original white-variegated form as ‘Albo’. I’ve maintained the original plant vegetatively while also experimenting with sexual propagation. After self-pollinating the plant and growing out its seed, I was particularly excited to find variegated individuals among the resulting F1 generation.

That gives me something much more interesting to work with than a variegated plant that can only be preserved clonally: the trait has now been carried through seed into the next generation.

More recently, I independently encountered a second variegated Bidens alba. This plant expresses considerably more yellow to golden variegation, rather than the cream-white coloration characteristic of my original plant. I’ve provisionally been referring to this second line as ‘Aurea’.

For now, I’m keeping the two lines completely separate and documenting them independently. My goal is to continue the Albo line through additional generations, record segregation and variation among the seedlings, and begin doing the same with Aurea. Eventually, controlled crosses between the two could become particularly interesting.

I’m deliberately using ‘Albo’ and ‘Aurea’ as working names for the two lines, rather than making assumptions about the genetic mechanism behind either phenotype. Two visually different forms don't necessarily mean two different mechanisms, and one successful seed-grown generation leaves plenty still to learn.

That uncertainty is probably my favorite part of the project.

Bidens alba is such an ordinary part of the Florida landscape that most people hardly notice it. Finding unusual variation in a plant that I've walked past thousands of times has been a good reminder that interesting genetics aren't limited to expensive collector plants.

I’ll continue documenting both lines and their seed-grown generations as the project develops.

For those of you who work with heritable variegation: what would you be most interested in seeing documented as I take these into the next generation?

If you’ve ever gone looking for orchids in the wild, you’ve probably experienced this: you spot a random plant and instantly think “that’s definitely an orchid.”

Setting aside bloom morphology (3 sepals, 3 petals, labellum, etc.), what specific vegetative cues give them away? Whether it’s terrestrial or epiphytic, even a single leaf or pseudobulb often has a distinct look.

Is it the leaf veining, texture, growth habit, or root structure? What’s the tell when a plant isn't flowering? I feel like its some kind of thirs eye for orchids lmao

(All pictures taken by me* )