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
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 🧪🐡 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
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.
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
Pictures 3 plants
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Question from Botanical University Challenge's past, in 2023. Recognise any of these? One occasionally grows in the UK & Ireland. All in the same plant family. But which one? #BUC2026
Pale blue background. 2 pictures on it. One photo of cluster of orange trumpet -shaped flowers with lanceolate emerald-green leaves. Other picture is engraving of the flowers and leaves growing around a branch with 3 large blue birds among them.
The Birds of America was produced 1827 - 1838 John James Audubon with 435 life sized prints North American birds. Around 200 copies made. Now $6 - 8 million per copy, among most expensive printed books. Also, lots of plants included. See trumpet flower vine, probably Campsis radicans. #BUC2026
Screen grab
Although teams in Botanical University Challenge are from UK and Ireland, questions can feature plants from around the world. On Day 1 almost half of the 32 teams recognised, or knew, the plant family of the leaves used as part of betel nut chewing. From betel, Piper betle. #BUC2026
Screen grab questions from Botanical University Challenge 2026
#BUC2026 Interesting question - and answer. Bred by Colin Leakey. Read about him and his aims for these beans www.seedsovereignty.info/lunch-at-mr-...
Flatulence is not the only problem with beans, also long cooking times and poor bioavailability of iron. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
Gold and jewels ring brooch. Picture of real plant seeds pods probably depicted between the jewels.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Plants as symbols of powerful families. This gold brooch found 1971 in in roadworks, Victoria Street, Manchester, UK. Made 1280 – 1320. Pods between garnets & sapphires likely Genista sagittalis, winged broom, badge of King Henry II’s father Geoffrey of Anjou. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 #InternationalWomensDay2026 See some of the women involved with making Botanical University Challenge happen, scientists included in the questions, asking questions to the team competitors. #BUC2026
Background of pears. Picture to illustrate 12 Days of Christmas. Screengrab from BUC2026 Round 3 of 72% teams knowing only one plant mentioned in the song 12 Days of Christmas. QR code to watch Round 3.
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Why does song '12 Days of Christmas' lack plants? Christmas tree, holly, cranberries, sprouts, oranges, mistletoe, ivy, carrots, chestnuts, potatoes, poinsettia, sloes, walnuts, onions, Christmas rose, thyme. Christmas would be so different without them! #BUC2026
