Conifer Path News Today

A Lijiang spruce tree near the south end of Conifer Path typically produces two types of cones: pollen-producing males and seed-producing females. This year its produced hermaphrodite conifer cones which produce both pollen and seeds.

A Lijiang spruce tree near the south end of Conifer Path typically produces two types of cones: pollen-producing males and seed-producing females. This year its produced hermaphrodite conifer cones which produce both pollen and seeds.

Botany rule # 17: all conifer cones, for the last 300 million years (give or take) are unisexual. Each cone either produces pollen (male function through sperm) or seeds (female […]

A Lijiang spruce at the Arnold Arboretum has produced a rare batch of cones that are half male, half female. Typically the tree would have separate pollen-producing male cones and other seed-making female cones.

Photograph by William (Ned) Friedman We live in an age of ecosystems—of life threatened on a planetary scale by climate change—and of genomes—of life analyzed at the molecular level, unveiling our own evolutionary history and the processes that underlie all of biology. Powerful though these constructs are, if one’s views of biology, of life, are predominantly through the lenses of ecosystems and genomes, something has been lost.  I am an organismic biologist—a plant morphologist to ...