A common plant used in many holiday traditions is mistletoe. However, mistletoe is both poisonous to us and it is a parasitic plant that can kill many of our native ...

Front door of a home decorated with Christmas greenery - Maryna Terletska/Getty Images Hang a bundle of this leafy, white-berried plant from a doorway this December, and it could bring you luck for ...

The French botanist and biologist Francis Hallé has spent 40 years in pursuit of the strange and beautiful plant specimens of the rainforest. In his Atlas of Poetic Botany, excerpted below, he invites ...

Mistletoe may be a feature of the holiday season across the country but it isn't something anyone will want to see on trees. That's because despite its Christmas reputation, mistletoe is actually a ...

If you happen to come across plants of the Balanophoraceae family in a corner of a forest, you might easily mistake them for fungi growing around tree roots. Their mushroom-like structures are ...

The world’s only wild black-furred rabbit has a very important job — distributing seeds for a parasitic plant. By Jason Bittel On the Amami Islands of Japan, wonder blooms from a nibble and some ...

In the weird world of chlorophyll-free “fairy lantern” plants, there’s a new species to admire. By plant standards, Thismia are truly odd. Lacking chlorophyll, they eschew photosynthesis, instead ...

Nematologists have long wondered how the the Northern root-knot nematode (Meloidogyne hapla) is able to infect such a wide ...

The oldest animal DNA yet recovered comes from a mammoth that lived over 1 million years ago, Erin Garcia de Jesús reported in “Million-year-old mammoth DNA found” (SN: 3/13/21, p. 6). Considering ...