Scientists have created herbicide-resistant corn with a new kind of genetic engineering that involves subtly altering one of the plant's own genes rather than adding a new gene. (p. 294)

For the first time, plants have been caught tapping into the most widespread of soil fungi networks and using it to steal food from green plants. (p. 197)

An experiment designed by a botany professor to last longer than his own life has demonstrated that seeds of two common flowers still sprout and blossom despite more than a century in a bottle. (p. 132)

Comparison between crop and wild sunflower genes suggests that the plant followed an easy route to domestication. (p. 126)

An unusual test of a biological control for the blight that's killing American chestnuts doesn't look good in the largest remaining patch. (p. 94)

A microbe related to the one that caused the Irish potato famine may be killing majestic old beech trees in the northeastern United States. (p. 70)

Scientists have discovered a gene that controls whether flowers lean to the left or the right. (p. 372)

Early spring flowers and the sugar maples they grow under use different alarm clocks to get going in the spring, which can make life hard for the flowers in northern forests. (p. 238)

The fringe on the edges of the floating blooms of water snowflake flowers helps protect the important parts from getting drenched in dunkings. (p. 174)

A common tropical tree creates farms in its buds, where it raises its own work force of tiny pollinators. (p. 69)

In a seed-dispersal mechanism scientists have never seen before in flowering plants, rain plops into a capsule and makes seeds shoot out the corners. (p. 54)