Plant Science & Conservation

What’s the first plant you ever loved? In the past two years since I co-founded Plant Love Stories, people have told me their stories. I love to hear them—and not just because I’m a plant conservation scientist.

The iconic Antarctic environment has captured the imagination of scientists for many years. Until a few decades ago, that frontier mostly remained inaccessible to women because of the challenges many women continue to face in participating in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine) careers.

When you think of fires that occur in the natural world, you might think of destruction and loss of wildlife. But when it comes to the North American prairie, fires are a crucial tool for native plants to thrive and to safeguard against extinction.

How does a college intern help advance science on pollinators of native prairie wildflowers and other plants? It starts with a summer filled with scientific observation at the Nativars Research Plot in the Bernice E. Lavin Plant Evaluation Garden.

Leaves are intriguing—with all their shapes, colors, textures, and their incredible ability to harness the energy of the sun. But when you come to realize that there is a whole world living within them, you can’t help but be amazed.

Plants give us some amazing gifts: food, shelter, many medicines, even the air we breathe. And they do the same for the world’s wildlife. Indeed, all life depends on plants.

What happens if spring wildflowers open up too early—or too late? How does the timing of flowering synchronize with native bees and other pollinators?

These are just some of the questions I’m studying as a master’s of science candidate in the Plant Biology and Conservation graduate program run by Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Today, on International Women’s Day, the Chicago Botanic Garden celebrates women in science at our institution and around the world. At the Garden, 20 of our 33 scientific staff members are women and, in our graduate program in plant biology and conservation with Northwestern University, 62 percent of the students are female.

Persistence can be a good trait for prairie plants. Take this tale of the return of the Hill’s thistle (Cirsium hillii) to the Dixon Prairie at the Chicago Botanic Garden.I’m the assistant ecologist for the natural areas at the Garden. While managing some tall vegetation on the gravel hill of the Dixon Prairie in summer 2016, I noticed something I have not seen in a while. It was a thistle!

Fast and graceful, hummingbirds flit from flower to flower—but which ones and why? A Chicago Botanic Garden scientist and his collaborators recently made some unexpected findings on the subject.It’s a common perception that plants are perfectly matched to their pollinators and that each pollinator has a specific flower type that they are attracted to. For hummingbirds, many gardeners and scientists alike have long assumed their flower type to be one that is strikingly red, tubular, and scentless.