At last the wonderful botanical outreach project #wildflowerhour has hit Dr M’s fav family – the Poaceae with the #grasschallenge for Sunday 23rd June 2019! To celebrate, Dr M popped into his garden and plucked some grasses from his Poaceae-rich #nomow lawn. Without really trying, Dr M returned with a big bunch of grasses and then set about trying to photograph them in the
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OK, Listen up plant lovers and botanophiles alike! Stuff like this really doesn’t happen that often, I mean, when did you last have a chance to attend a Dr M Botanical course? Like never, or at least oh so rarely! We are talking hen’s teeth, we really are! So, come on down to London town and join the botanical love and joy at Dr M’s
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Dr M says: Your patience is rewarded and here at last is Part the Second of Dr M’s long-awaited Poaceae quiz! Grasses, so the Poaceae song goes, and as Dr M’s students on University of Reading MSc Plant Diversity know well, have “flowers reduced to spikelets strange yet magical”. The grass spikelet is indeed a wondrous thing and has an intrinsic beauty and fascination
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So #2 in Dr M’s weekend mystery plant mini-quiz was a grass-like plant for sure, but without one of the defining feature of the family, a ligule! Check the images here if you want to remind yourself. A grass without a ligule is that possible? Is it really a grass? Yes it is possible (though uncommon), and yes it is a grass! And from the featured
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OK it’s nearly the weekend, so to get you in the mini-holiday spirit here is #2 in Dr M’s new botanical mini-quiz series: a plant which breaks the rules! Dr M likes nothing more than a plant which breaks the rules because plants which don’t quite do what we expect challenge us and teach us lots about the importance of things like variation and plasticity in
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If you have read Dr M’s eXtreme botany manifesto you will know that Dr M is an advocate of video as a medium for teaching botany, for example learning species identification. Dr M is discussing these issues at INTECOL in London today and in September at the Enhancing Fieldwork Learning Showcase Event.
Dr M is warming up for the INTECOL Conference in London this week where he will be discussing using video for plant ID. In preparation, Dr M has been perusing botany videos on the Internet for quantity and quality and here Molly Marquand (seen here previously on New England Asteraceae) explains about different kinds of monocot. Check out NewEnglandWild for more videos on monocots and other plants.