Bluebell Paradise

Bluebells at Harcourt Arboretum by Clare Holt, Nice Tree Films The bluebell wood at Harcourt Arboretum is a real hidden gem of Oxfordshire, which unfurls its secrets every spring with an exquisite display of millions of flowers. The oak woodland provides the perfect habitat for the English Bluebell, and in this short film, Timothy Walker, the Director of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, tells us what it takes to make a bluebell happy, and why the Elizabethan fashion designers had a lot to thank this iconic wild flower for.

Scent of Revolution

Since Tunisian revolutionaries anointed their successful revolt the “Jasmine Revolution,” the flowering cousin of the olive tree has been branded a nefarious change-agent | NYTimes

Leafsnap

Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and theSmithsonian Institution are working on visual recognition software to help identify species from photographs. Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed to demonstrate this new technology. This free mobile app helps identify tree species from photographs of their leaves and contains beautiful high-resolution images of their flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to cover the trees of the entire continental United States.

Leafsnap turns users into citizen scientists, automatically sharing images, species identifications, and geo-coded stamps of species locations with a community of scientists who will use the stream of data to map and monitor the ebb and flow of flora nationwide.