Beyond the Human Eye

Welsh poppy Meconopsis cambrica has spread all over my garden in recent years, seeding itself in all sorts of unlikely places, in...

All the goosegrass under the hedge outside my garden is covered with frothy bubbles of cuckoo spit – and here’s one of the perpetrators, the...

Even as a dyed-in-the-wool botanist I have to admit that rushes ( Juncus species) are pretty dull plants – just spiky bunches of cylindrica...

Amoeba come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. The bog-standard, free-range amoeba glides wherever its pseudopodia take it, going with t...

TV wildlife documentaries tend to focus on large animals with fur or feathers, but most of the animal world is tiny and many of the microsco...

This amazing creature is a heliozoan (literally ‘sun animal’), which is an amoeba that surrounds itself with a formidable battery of needle-...

The colour of a flower is the result of a combination of the floral pigments contained in the petal cells and the optical characteristics of...

Turn over an alder leaf at this time of year and you may find what look like small lumps of cotton wool stuck to the leaf blade and leaf s...

I found about a dozen dead flies like this one, head down, tongues extended, clinging to the flower heads of meadow foxtail grass. They’ve b...

Take a close look at meadow foxtail grass’s flower spikes in spring and you’ll find that the youngest have just begun to produce their feath...