All posts tagged with plants

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.

  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.

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”.

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.