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The symbolism of plants

With the forthcoming 12 monthly articles we want to give a certain insight into how former generations and cultures, having far less access to rational and experimental scientific knowledge than modern scientists, tried to explain and interpret their observations in the plant kingdom.

That’s from Riklef Kandeler and Wolfram Ullrich’s introduction to their series on “Symbolism of plants: examples of European-Mediterranean culture presented with biology and history of art” in the Journal of Experimental Botany. 1 It started last January, and each month brings a new plant. June’s installment has just come out. It’s on lilies. No crops, really, though some of the plants treated are used as food (e.g. Crocus). The focus is on plants which carry with them the heaviest symbolic baggage. You can set up an alert with the journal to tell you when the next in the series will come out.

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Photos of livestock and people published

Coincidentally, I also heard about another lot of agrobiodiversity photos today. Ellen Geerlings posted an announcement on ELDev about the publication of her book “People and livestock.”

The book contains photos taken over a period of 16 years. It includes 76 pages of photos of livestock keeping in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cameroon, Egypt, Mexico, India and Wales and more.

You can see the first 15 pages on the publisher’s website. And National Geographic has more photos. Well worth a look.

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Prizes for stunning garden photographs

The UK’s International Garden Photographer of the Year award have just been announced. The New Scientist has a nice selection. The competition’s website has all the category winners and finalists. There are some really great photos, including of crop plants. But I was disappointed that few of the photographs celebrated diversity per se, but rather took a somewhat reductionist, or perhaps minimalist, view. Having said that, there were exceptions.

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Bedbugs redux

Caveman Forecaster is a blog about “the art and science of time series analysis and forecasting.” There was a post about a month ago about bedbugs that really piqued my interest. It seems that bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) were virtually eradicated in the US fifty years ago, but are making a comeback. That has even led to the organization of a National Bedbug Summit, which took place last month. The post was mostly about using Google search data to monitor and predict the seasonal outbreaks and longer-term trends. But it got me looking into the reasons for the resurgence, and wikipedia has a reasonable summary of that, with plenty of references. Basically, genetic diversity studies suggest that there was never complete eradication, but that the pesticide-resistant populations moved to alternate hosts, “have slowly been propagating in poultry facilities, and have made their way back to human hosts via the poultry workers.” So here’s another example of a human pest which can also hang out with agrobiodiversity, and jump back and forth.