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It's not hard to see how the sapphire tower gets its name. Image Credit: HannaTor/Shutterstock.com Sometimes in nature, there are events that we have to wait for. Some, like the upcoming American cicadapocaplypse might not be so popular – whereas, across the pond in Birmingham, UK, botanists are thrilled to reveal the blooming of their sapphire tower. The sapphire tower plant (Puya alpestri) from the Chilean Andes can take up to 10 years to flower. The plant is a member of the bromeliad family, distantly related to the pineapple. Normally found at high elevations of up to 2,200 meters (7,218...

The trees that shade, cool and feed people from Ventura County to the Mexican border are dying so fast that within a few years it’s possible the region will look, feel, sound and smell much less pleasant than it does now.“We’re witnessing a transition to a post-oasis landscape in Southern California,” says Greg McPherson, a supervisory research forester with the U.S. Forest Service who has been studying what he and others call an unprecedented die-off of the trees greening Southern California’s parks, campuses and yards. Botanists in recent years have documented insect and disease infestations as they’ve hop-scotched about the...

Paintings can be a window to more than the outmoded dress and strange customs of the past — sometimes, they have modern-day science lessons to impart, too. That's the case with Giovanni Stanchi’s 17th century still life of fruit, as Phil Edwards points out for Vox — just look for the watermelons. Stanchi’s work, painted between 1645 and 1672 (and now up for auction at Christie’s), includes strange watermelons that look so foreign they could be from outer space in the bottom right corner. If watermelons looked like that in the Renaissance, then why do they look so different today?...

A plant that produces both tomatoes and potatoes, called the TomTato, has been developed for the UK market. Ipswich-based horticultural firm Thompson and Morgan said the hybrid plants were not genetically modified. Similar plants have been created in the UK, but the firm said it was thought to be the first time they had been produced on a commercial scale. Guy Barter, of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), said it was looking at the plant with "real interest". Mr Barter said many of these plants - created by a technique known as grafting - had been created before but taste...

Evidence of slaves' technical skills and religion at enlightenment greenhouse IMAGE: In West African practice, placing metal and pointed objects at the doorway helps deter harmful spirits from entering. These were found buried at the entrance to the slave quarters, until... COLLEGE PARK, Md. – One of North America's most famous Revolutionary-era buildings – a lone-surviving testament to an Enlightenment ideal – has a hidden West African face, University of Maryland archaeologists have discovered. Their excavation at the 1785 Wye “Orangery” on Maryland's Eastern Shore – the only 18th century greenhouse left in North America – reveals that African American...

A jury sentenced a Lakeview man to 10 years in prison for growing nearly 7,500 marijuana plants. Andrew Stever, 40, was sentenced on Monday after a three-day trial in the Federal District Court in Medford.Ten years is the mandatory minimum sentence for anyone convicted of growing 1,000 or more pot plants. In July 2007, officers from several local, state and federal agencies found 7,459 plants growing on Stever's Lakeview property, which bordered Forest Service land. Two men fled the scene, leaving behind personal property and three firearms, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Portland. Physical evidence and testimony linked...

Using DNA, Scientists Hunt For The Roots Of The Modern Potato ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2008) — More than 99 percent of all modern potato varieties planted today are the direct descendants of varieties that once grew in the lowlands of south-central Chile. How Chilean germplasm came to dominate the modern potato-which spread worldwide from Europe-has been the subject of a long, contentious debate among scientists. While some plant scientists have maintained that Chilean potatoes were the first to be planted in Europe, a more widely accepted story holds that European potatoes were originally descended from plants grown high in the...

William Stein, associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University... and his colleagues offer new insights into the world's oldest trees found in an area cited as home to the Earth's oldest forest. Located near the Gilboa Dam in Schoharie County, NY, the region has yielded tremendous tree trunks from the Devonian era, meaning they're roughly 380 million years old. These trunks have been studied by paleobotanists for about a century, but scientists could only guess what the tops of the trees looked like... The fossil, more than 12 feet long, offered the first evidence of how big and complex...

A federal grand jury indictment alleges that five people were behind the firebombing of the University of Washington's horticulture center in May 2001. The indictment returned Thursday names three people and refers to two others who were not identified in connection with the fire, one of the Northwest's most notorious acts of ecoterrorism. The horticulture center, which was rebuilt for about $7 million, had done work on fast-growing hybrid poplars in hopes of limiting the amount of natural forests that timber companies log. The Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy collection of environmental activists, claimed responsibility five days after the fire,...

A mother that gives violin lessons will face trial in the northwestern US state of Washington on charges she was an environmental terrorist, prosecutors said. Briana Waters, 30, of the famously liberal California city of Berkeley, has pleaded innocent in a Seattle federal court that she that fire bombed a horticulture center in 2001. A US district court judge allowed Waters to remain free pending the start of her trial in June, but ordered that she turn in her passport and have her whereabouts monitored electronically. Waters was the first person charged in connection with an attack that destroyed the...

It is the "Holy Grail" of horticulture and soon it could make the perfect present for Mother's Day: scientists have found a way to produce a blue rose.A chance discovery in a laboratory means that they will be able to create the blue rose "within a year" and it is expected to go on sale to the public soon after that.   How the blue rose could look Rose breeders and growers said that blue roses would be hugely popular and estimated that they would win five per cent - £35 million - of the £700 million international market for...

An US artist is selling miniature car crashes for bonsai trees.John Rooney makes toy cars look like they've been in a smash by taking them apart, damaging them and then putting them back together again.His hand-made creations sell for up to £100 each.Bonsai growers are expected to grow the bonsai around the vehicles by placing the tree more to one side of a pot to make room for the vehicle.Among the vehicles he has produced are classic cars, sports cars and even fuel tankers which have jack-knifed into the tree and exploded.John, from Boston, calls the works CrashBonsai and sells...