Featured series 
Tag: Plants
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Nation & World
Taxonomist Carl Linnaeus on show at HMNH
Carl Linnaeus believed that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was not an apple but a banana. He came to this conclusion in 1737, while studying plant specimens at Hartecamp, the estate of George Clifford, a wealthy Dutch banker and director of the Dutch East India Company. Clifford collected exotic plants from around the…
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Nation & World
Taxonomist Carl Linnaeus on show at HMNH
Carl Linnaeus believed that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was not an apple but a banana. He came to this conclusion in 1737, while studying plant specimens at Hartecamp, the estate of George Clifford, a wealthy Dutch banker and director of the Dutch East India Company. Clifford collected exotic plants from around the…
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Nation & World
Popular causes not necessarily best
Conservation policies favoring keystone animal species are insufficient to conserve the world’s biodiversity because many of these target animals don’t live in the world’s most biodiverse spots: lowland tropical forests under pressure from agriculture, logging, and other human activities.
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Nation & World
Harvard Forest announces Bullard Fellows
Harvard Forest recently announced the 2007-08 Charles Bullard Fellows in Forest Research. The purpose of this fellowship program, established in 1962, is to support advanced research and study by persons who show promise of making important contributions, either as scholars or administrators, to forestry defined in its broadest sense as the human use and study…
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Nation & World
Scientists have something to chew on
In a groundbreaking study, two Harvard scientists have for the first time extracted human DNA from ancient artifacts. The work potentially opens up a new universe of sources for ancient genetic material, which is used to map human migrations in prehistoric times.
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Nation & World
First orchid fossil puts showy blooms at some 80 million years old
Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have coexisted with dinosaurs.
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Nation & World
Warming may not spark tree growth
A bright spot in the gloomy global warming picture has been scientists’ predictions that at least some carbon dioxide will be removed from the atmosphere by a burst of growth from tropical forests. New research from the Arnold Arboretum, however, questions that prediction, finding that trees in two forests on opposite sides of the world…
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Nation & World
Richard Alden Howard
On the last day in May, 1962, Professor Richard Howard received the following civil subpoena: “You are hereby commanded to appear in the United States District Court [and to] bring with you the entire card catalog of all books, pamphlets, monographs etc. now located in the Administration Building at Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain.”
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Nation & World
World’s largest flower evolved from family of much tinier blooms
The plant with the world’s largest flower – typically a full meter across, with a bud the size of a basketball – evolved from a family of plants whose blossoms are nearly all tiny, botanists write this week in the journal Science. Their genetic analysis of rafflesia reveals that it is closely related to a…