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    All Featured Books
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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
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    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with plants

Blog Reel, User Stories

Heterostyly Before Darwin: Tracing Early Observations of Primula Floral Morphs

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In 1860, Charles Darwin had an epiphany. This was not an epiphany on the origin of species, as his monumental publication on the subject had been published one year earlier in 1859. This epiphany, which Darwin shared in a letter to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, was that flowers in the genus Primula display two distinct forms which differ in the length of the pistil’s styles and the height of the stamen’s anthers.

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September 14, 2017byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya

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Joseph Hooker, born 200 years ago this year, may have been the greatest botanist of the nineteenth century, professionalizing practice of the discipline and establishing the system of botanical classification used almost universally until the advent of genetics-based systems. He was certainly one of the most pivotal Directors in the history of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, defending its role as a scientific institution rather than a pleasure park and expanding its infrastructure and collections.
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June 30, 2017byVirginia Mills
BHL News, Blog Reel

Celebrating Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

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Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was one of the most important botanists of the 19th century and Kew Gardens’ most illustrious Director (1865-1885). To celebrate the bicentenary of his birth this year, BHL is joining the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to highlight Hooker’s works and contributions as part of the #JDHooker2017 campaign.

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March 27, 2017byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Michał Piotr Boym’s Flora sinensis, fructus floresque humillime [Flora of China, fruits and flowers].

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  Flora sinensis is one of the first natural history books on China by a European. Authored by Michał Piotr Boym, it was published in 1656 by Matthæi Rictii in Vienna. Boym dedicated it to Leopold I (1640-1705), Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary and Croatia, King of Bohemia and King of Serbia, and included a poem incorporating chronograms alluding to his coronation date, 1655. Augustin Pyramus, a Swiss Botanist, identified Boym as the first person to use ‘flora’ to define the plants of a particular region, habitat or geological period.

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December 22, 2016byAnne Griffin
Blog Reel, User Stories

Poetic Botany: A Digital Exhibition Celebrating the History of Botany

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‘Queen of the dark, whose tender glories fade In the gay radiance of the noon-tide hours.’ ‘That flower, supreme in loveliness, and pure As the pale Cynthia’s beams, through which unveiled It blooms, as if unwilling to endure The gaze, by which such beauties are assailed.’ These elegant lines are quoted in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (v. 62, 1835) as part of the description for the Night-blowing (Blooming) Cereus (Selenicereus grandiflorus) and serve as an artful conveyance of the species’ nocturnal blooming. But these lines represent more than just a whimsical representation of plant behavior.
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December 8, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Early Land Plants and the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation

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Bryophytes are green land plants that lack true vascular tissue. They encompass mosses (Bryophyta), hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) and liverworts (Marchantiophyta). Bryophytes form an important component in many ecosystems, offering microhabitats for an abundance of biodiversity including single-celled eukaryotes, protozoa, and many invertebrates (Gerson 1982). They also play an important part in the global carbon budget and can support climate change research by serving as “indicators of past climate change, [validating] climate models, and as potential indicators of global warming”.

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March 1, 2016byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

New Postage Stamps Featuring Images from the NYBG Nursery & Seed Catalog Collection

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Today, January 29, 2016, the U.S. Postal Service released 10 new postage stamps featuring images from catalogs in The New York Botanical Garden’s nursery and seed catalog collection. The 10 Botanical Art Forever stamps feature illustrations from American nursery catalogs printed between 1891 and 1912. NYBG’s nursery and seed catalog collection is one of the largest and most important collections in the United States.

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January 29, 2016byGrace Costantino
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