plants

Happy Poinsettia Day! Of the countless iconic holiday season images in American homes, perhaps the most popular and colorful of them started off as a humble bush from our neighbors to the south. The poinsettia was introduced to this country in the late 1820s by Joel Poinsett, the first American...

Pristine landscaping covers the 355 acres of Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. On a day where caretakers dutifully trim the grass and care for the about 200,000 headstones marking the final resting place of veterans and their families, three plant specialists with the USDA’s Natural...

Plants provide us with many things that we use on a daily basis – from the buildings in which we live and work, to our clothing and food. For flowering plants to thrive and reproduce, they often rely on pollinators to transport pollen between flowers. Pollination ultimately results in fruits and...

Imagine wandering through your favorite botanic garden in the early evening and catching a glimpse of the moon reflected off of something lime green that moves from flower to flower while closer to the ground the yellow glow of fireflies help illuminate the night. It’s enough to make you feel like...

It’s a wonder that Justin Runyon’s parents didn’t have insomnia. After all, who could sleep when the young bug enthusiast was throwing on floodlights outside the house in the middle of the night to attract and collect insects? “Yes, my parents were very patient with me,” said Runyon, a research...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio. As a boy, Steven Cannon helped his grandfather in the garden grafting fruit trees, all the while developing an interest in...

If you’re wondering what aquaponics is, you’re not alone. Tracing its roots back to the Aztecs and rice cultivation in South China, aquaponics is a combination of aquaculture and hydroponics – growing fish and plants together in a symbiotic system. Basically, the plants keep the water clean for the...

For more than 20 years, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has been growing seeds for the Grand Canyon National Park and other national parks. When the National Park Service renovated the Grand Canyon’s South Rim visitor center in 2008, they looked to the NRCS Plants Materials...

Recently the PLANTS website crossed a milestone with the uploading of its 50,000 th image. The database, managed by the National Plant Data Team at the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s East National Technology Support Center, hosts images of plants that grow in the U.S. and its...

Native American agriculture techniques once dominated the continent, but after the arrival of Europeans, many of those traditions were nearly lost. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service is working with tribal communities and ethnobotanists to restore some of these techniques and crops. NRCS...