Walk through almost any American town in late May and you’ll see them: small red paper flowers pinned to lapels, tucked into wreaths, handed out […]
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The Fibonacci pattern hiding in almost every flower head
Count the spiral rows in the seed head of a sunflower, or the petals on a daisy, and a strange mathematical pattern shows up more […]
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What a flower’s Latin name actually tells you
Every recognized flowering plant species carries a two-part scientific name, a system called binomial nomenclature that Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus formalized in the 1750s. Rosa […]
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The flower world’s actual size records, from the largest bloom to the smallest
Flowers span an enormous range of physical scale, from a single bloom wide enough to cover a card table to a plant so small its […]
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The zinnia that bloomed on the International Space Station
In January 2016, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly posted a photograph of an orange zinnia blooming aboard the International Space Station, captioned simply that it was […]
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Darwin’s abominable mystery, and how close science has come to solving it
In an 1879 letter to fellow botanist Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin described the sudden, unexplained appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record as an […]
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What actually makes a petal red, blue, or nearly black
Flower color comes down to a fairly small set of pigment families, and the difference between a red rose and a blue delphinium, or between […]
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The flowers that are secretly named after people
A surprising number of common flower names are not descriptions at all, but tributes to the botanists, explorers, and patrons who first classified or funded […]
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The 1867 rose that created an entirely new category of flower
Every modern hybrid tea rose, the long-stemmed, single-bloom-per-stalk variety sold in florist shops worldwide, traces its lineage to a single rose bred in Lyon, France, […]
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Inside the flower auction that sets prices for half the world’s cut blooms
Somewhere outside Amsterdam, before most of Europe wakes up, an auction hall roughly the size of hundreds of football fields is already moving a volume […]
