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Wood can be made into beautiful artistic & informative objects. Trophy goblet, wood in proportions UK National Vegetation Classification type W10 'bluebell woodland'. Oak, birch, beech, holly, rowan, yew, lime, poplar. For winners #BUC2025 to admire and pass on.

Origami can be used to make 3D models of plants. Folding paper, made from plants, again and again. Artistic and imaginative. Also interesting mathematics. Picture is Kawasaki Rose, devised by Toshikazu Kawasaki, origami theorist. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshikazu… #BUC2025

Royal Academy of Arts for top UK artists. Founded 1768, supporter King George III. Mary Moser RA was a founding member. Admired for pictures of flowers, & humans. Commissions & teaching royal family members, involved Royal Academy organisation. #BUC2025 royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/na…

Artificial flowers now made with traditional materials like silk but also new plastics. Mass produced, sold in shops worldwide. Available to all. Shows people like to have flowers around the home, short-lived real ones or long-lasting artificial. #BUC2025

Looks like scenery in Jurassic Park film, but is real temperate rainforest in Australia. Ferns and tree ferns. #BUC2025

#seeddispersal How do seeds move around? Some have hooks to use animal fur. Wood avens (herb bennet, Rose family) common in wooded and urban Eurasia and N. America, flowers and seeds held at human knee height ready for a ride! #BUC2025

#SeedDispersal Other ways plants co-opt animals to disperse their seeds include birds caching as food stores - and then forgetting to eat them all! Technical name for this strategy is epizoochory. #BUC2025

#SeedDispersal Many animals eat plant seeds. That takes the seeds away from parent plant. Some seeds are well protected to pass through the gut and back out to land in animal dung, that can be an excellent environment for a germinating seed! #BUC2026

#SeedDispersal Many plant seeds travel through the air to new homes. Short or long distance. Many different shapes to fly and be blown by the wind. Technical name anemochory. #BUC2025

#SeedDispersal Another way for seeds to disperse themselves is to be tiny to drift through the air. #Orchids have taken this to an extreme, with most seeds much less than a milligram, abandoning food reserves, and relying on finding a fungus to nurture germination. #BUC2025

How do seeds develop? Programme produces embryonic seedling, tiny root and leaf (cotyledon). Often food package (oils, carbohydrates) to power germination & get leaf into the light. Then development really starts. Results in similar plant seedlings, unlike baby animals. #BUC2025

Seeds monocots include grasses, carbohydrates for most people on Earth. Maize/Corn (Zea mays) cultivated for 9000 yrs started Mexico now worldwide. More produced than other grains. Food for humans, animals; materials chemical industry. Needs humans to scatter seeds. #BUC2025

Around 70% Earth covered in sea. Some flowering plants live in it (e. g. Neptune grass, eel grass) and not easily seen. Others live at sea edges & disperse their seeds using it (e. g. coconuts, mangrove, sea beans). #SeedDispersal #BUC2025

#SeedDispersal Drift seeds, aka sea beans, dispersed by ocean currents, can travel thousands of miles. Mostly from tropical plants, colonize remote islands & become mysterious sea offerings found by people on beaches. Name sea bean also given to some salt-marsh plants. #BUC2025

#SeedDispersal Some plants reward animals for spreading seeds. e.g. ants! Myrmecochory. Small seeds that ants can carry with gift of food for ant attached (elaiosome). Taken into nests, gift eaten, seed discarded in good location to grow. #BUC2025

#SeedDispersal #BUC2025 Some plant seeds can move and plant themselves. Happens in some grasses. For example, wild oats uses awns to get seeds into soil. Hear David Attenborough talking about this with great pictures. youtube.com/watch?app=desk…

#SeedDispersal People now have local & world-wide systems to collect, store and distribute seeds, especially for agricultural plants. Svalbard Global Seed Bank opened 2008 for duplicate storage of over 1.3 million packets of food plant seeds. #BUC2025 croptrust.org

#SeedDispersal 25th anniversary Millennium Seed Bank Kew Gardens and Wakehurst Place. Not just food plants now 40,000 species, 275 partners, 100 countries, 2.5 billion seeds! New storage methods. Celebration events summer 2025. #BUC2025 kew.org/wakehurst/what…

CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), global research partnership for food-security. Includes many seed banks - and also living collections of food plants that cannot be stored as seeds - potato, many fruit trees, cassava, sweet potato ... #BUC2025

#SeedDispersal Specialist seedbanks like International Potato Center, Lima, Peru. 16,700 potatoes, sweet potatoes, other Andean roots & tubers wild relatives. Stores tubers, seeds, cryopreserved tissues (frozen -196 C) and grows them regularly. #BUC2025 cipotato.org/genebankcip/