Yes, correct. The picture is a statue of Linneus, who devised and popularised the binomial system for naming species of plants, animals, fungi, lichens, bacteria - all life. It is outside the Sefton Park Palm House in Liverpool, UK.
Statue of a man outside Sefton Park Palm House, Liverpool, UK.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃🐡 Who is this man? Made groundbreaking system used across biological sciences. First description published in 1735, system was in 10th edition by 1758, showing how it had caught on. Still in use now. #BUC2026
Purple flowers among green leaves
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃🐡 #Springflowers. Sweet violets, cultivated for their scent, selected in different colours, once an important cut flower (Victorians). Edible flowers. Extracted for scent and flavoured syrup. Still a lovely wild woodland edge and hedgerow plant in UK and Ireland. #BUC2026
UK and Ireland distribution map adder's tongue (fern) and pic of fern - looks like a green snake head and tongue.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃🐡Questions in Botanical University Challenge about ferns. Student wrote about her favourite in the newsletter. Another about how he got into ferns & is now British Pteridological Soc committee member! Crowdfunder lets these meet. See QR code or reading.hubbub.net/p/botanicalu...
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 🧪🐡 The crowdfunder for #BUC2026, specifically the 4th Student Botany Festival in August, is underway. This event has such an impact on UK & Irish students keen on botany. Look at reading.hubbub.net/p/botanicalu...
Keep them smiling! Please donate or share!!
Twig of flat green lanceolate-oval green leaves. Spray of cream flowers of the same tree, bay.
#Spring Trees in flower. Bay tree (Laurus nobilis) now flowering enthusiastically around UK and Ireland. Separate male and female trees (dioecious). Leaves as food flavouring. Evergreen large shrub/small tree family Lauraceae once covered Mediterranean Basin in forests. #BUC2026
Plants with large white flowers
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 Plants from around the world, mostly now in cultivation for white blooms around Easter time. Easter lilies (and cactus). Liliaceae, Amaryllidaceae, Araceae and Cactaceae! #BUC2026
Thanks for more plants with names including the word Easter. Is there a good list of Irish plant names anywhere (Irish Gaelic or English)? Names I used come from Geoffrey Grigson's 1958 compilation of local wild flower names in 'The Englishman's Flora'. Also, of course, character limit on social me
Easter named plants - daffodil (yellow flower), greater stitchwort (white flower), primrose (yellow flower) and bistort (mass of pink flowers on a stem).
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 Several #Spring plants in UK & Ireland with local names including #Easter that were not adopted more widely. Easter ledger pudding of its leaves plus dandelion, lady's mantle (or nettle) leaves with barley & egg. Accompaniment for veal & bacon. Yum? #BUC2026
'Let's Botanize: 101 Ways to Connect with Plants' by Ben Goulet-Scott and Jacob Suissa, set among the wild and garden plants of USA, sounds like an excellent way into appreciating and understanding plants. It is not all about plant identification. #BUC2026
Narrow green leaves, dark brown flower clusters, yellow styles.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🍂 🌲🌿🎄🍃This little plant grows all over the UK and Ireland (and now worldwide) in lawns & grassland. Leaves look like grass, but is technically a rush, Juncaceae. Flowers in #Spring April - May, also has name Good Friday Grass & Chimney Sweeps. Milfyw (Welsh), Giúnach léana (Irish) #BUC2026
Pine cones with seeds
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🍂 🌲🌿🎄🍃Other non-flowering plants start to reproduce in #Spring. Gymnosperms - 'naked seeds' - can take years to develop from ovule to seed - so need to get started! #BUC2026
Not only flowering plants start to reproduce in #Spring. Horsetails produce spores, dominated late Paleozoic forests, first evolved in early Jurassic. A few species still survive, with beige cones releasing spores before green leaves appear later. #BUC2026
Liverwort and moss showing vertical structures in which spores form.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🍂 #Spring Liverworts and mosses - no flowers, but have spores for sexual reproduction. Very short-lived structures in liverworts, but present much longer in mosses. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🍂 Some beautiful spring flowers are challenging to see in the wild. For example purple saxifrage, Saxifraga oppositifolia. Green cushions with gorgeous purple flowers, but in UK and Ireland only on mountains. Likes really inaccessible sites! #BUC2026
Image screengrab article from newspaper. Image of Vaccinium vitis idaea flower, fruit. For more informatio see: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/28/cambridge-university-botany-course-charles-darwin-john-stevens-henslow
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🍂 Plant knowledge becoming more popular! Cambridge Uni botanic garden @cubotanicgarden.bsky.social joins UK others offering short courses plant vocabulary & ID. Also BSBI @bsbibotany.bsky.social Identiplant (enrol December), Plantlife @plantlifeuk.bsky.social , Field Studies Council #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳🧪 Botanical University Challenge #BUC2026 - UK and Ireland's quiz and festival for degree students enthusiastic about plants. Currently seeking financial support!
Blue bell woodland - tall thin tree trunks with pale green leaves filtering light to ground covered in bright blue bluebells and their dark green stems and leaves.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 #Springflowers #BUC2026 Spring is arriving around UK and Ireland. A few cold, wet, days can't hold it back! Bluebells opening until they reach glorious blue haze across woodlands.
Well spotted!
What is it?
Stained glass rose window. Many images of vine leaves.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Victorian stained glass in 11th century church (many later additions/repairs!). Look closely at rose window (plant name!) and see - vine leaves. Plant images get everywhere. In Cheltenham Minster, St Mary's, UK. #BUC2026
Diagram of biological nitrogen fixation in legume plants and rhizobium bacteria.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Biological nitrogen fixation, as in relationship between legumes (peas beans, lupins) and rhizobium bacteria requires ridiculous amount of energy, oxygen-free structure in roots (nodules), lots of genes and well-timed communication between the partners. #BUC2026
Bright red sweet bell pepper, whole and half, with structure chemical responsible for much of the colour. Also bright yellow pepper.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 What causes the bright colours/colors of flowers, leaves and fruits? Some are the carotenoids - over 1,100 different chemical structures that result in reds, yellows and oranges. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Spring! Birdsong. Flowers appearing. Also flowers on trees, including gymnosperms - flowering cones. Some pretty colours/colors, like these female cones of Larch. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Fossil plants. Fallen apart as preserved in rock but still with their intrinsic beauty. Find them on the beach, at the roadside, in museums. #BUC2026
Pictures brown-orange rolled up bark, powdered; green elegant oval leading to a point leaves; chemical structure cinnamaldehyde. QR code for BUC2026 recordings.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Flavour of cinnamon is from chemicals within bark of Cinnamomum genus trees like cinnamaldehyde and eugenol. Plant family Lauraceae. Evergreen trees. Several species grown commercially. South & SE Asia and Oceania/Australasia. #BUC2026
sculpture
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Plants inspiring sculpture. Cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris), 2.3 metre high, along a riverside pathway. Similarly tall sculptures of dandelion, horsetail & common reed also along the path. #BUC2026
pictures of shamrock
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Plants as national symbols? 17 March, St Patrick's Day, patron saint Ireland. Shamrock (seamróg, young clover), but exactly which plant is 'shamrock'? Usually Trifolium dubium (lesser/yellow clover, Irish: seamair bhuí) or Trifolium repens (white clover, Irish: seamair bhán). #BUC2026
Pictures are of family Orobanchaceae. All the family are partly or fully parasitic on other plants. The middle one, purple toothwort (Lathraea clandestina), is occasionally found in UK & Ireland, on tree roots eg willow, poplar, alder. Only flowers appear above ground. #BUC2026
The flowers do look a bit like that, don't they. Indeed, the taxonomy of some of the genera in this family has moved around over the years. However, they are not settled in the peas/ Fabaceae at the moment. Their life-style is not a beneficial as the nitrogen-fixing host of the pea family!
