ANDRZEJ KRAUZEBotany has never been my strong suit, but this month’s focus on plant biology reminded me, yet again, what botanists already know: plants are amazing. Darwin, whose birthday is this month, described himself in an 1846 letter to the great botanist Joseph Hooker as “a man who hardly knows a daisy from a Dandelion.” But Darwin wrote a number of books about plants in his continuing effort to understand and test his conceptions about some of the more difficult predictions of evolution, including a book titled The Power of Movement in Plants. Published in 1880 to scant interest, the book never enjoyed much popularity, and after his death in 1882 was not reprinted for 84 years.
Although they employ various methods of pollination and seed dispersal to propagate their offspring, most terrestrial plants are securely rooted to one spot. They can’t run away from bacterial or fungal attackers, and thus have developed a two-pronged immunological system in order to stand up for themselves. Read all about it in “Holding Their Ground.” Some plants have even recruited a mobile defense in the form of friendly fungi that migrate to the site of pathogen attack (here).
A mnemonic popular with gardeners also touches on content in this issue: “Plant peas on President’s Day.” Or, as some would have it, St. Patrick’s Day. Exactly when you perform this earliest spring gardening task obviously depends on where you live, and it has been suggested that ...
