The plant world has numerous, amazing examples of resilience. Cycads, for example, are fascinating ancient plants thought to have evolved from ferns. Having been around for nearly 300 million years, they are models of longevity and hardiness. What are cycads? Think dinosaurs and the Jurassic period, which was so dominated by cycads that it is
By Rosalie Robison Many know Beatrix Potter as the author and illustrator of famous children’s books like The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but there’s another side to her. Before she became known for popular children’s characters like Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle Duck, she drew hundreds of fungi and experimented with growing mushroom spores. One
Crazy fact: Nearly one of every ten species of flowering plants is an orchid. Current tallies have about 28,000 species of orchids (with many, many more hybrids and cultivars), which is twice as many bird species and four times as many mammal species. For some reason, I have never much cared for orchids. Something about
The winter cracks our perception of ourselves. The seasons toss us through cycles of wash, rinse, dry, and tumble; every year we get the same treatment even though we sense each stage in a cycle of unique moments. Nature signals familiar patterns if we look, but many of us now live a life of screens:
Inhale the fragrance of coconut geraniums or spicy shell ginger, pop a citrusy kumquat into your mouth, and pretend you’re in the Mediterranean while the snowstorm rages outside. Welcome to the UWM Greenhouse, located on the UW-Milwaukee campus in Wisconsin. I began volunteering at the Greenhouse after becoming a UWM employee in 2018. Before the
By Rosalie Robison “There is a low mist in the woods— It is a good day to study lichens.” ― Henry David Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851 Lichen is life in its most basic form: the precursor to soil and higher plant forms. Lichen arrived on Earth at least 250 million years ago and consists
