A very happy World Bee Day to you. Let's talk pollinators.

How to Protect Your Local Pollinators in Ten Easy Ways

As the first annual World Bee Day looms, insect and garden lovers are abuzz with excitement

The Desert Pavilion at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

This Friday, You Can Visit More Than 150 of the Best Gardens in the U.S. for Free

Celebrate National Public Gardens Day May 11

PLYMOUTH NAVAL MEMORIAL, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND - "WAVE" August 23 - November 19, 2017

Europe

This Stunning Memorial to Britain’s WWI Soldiers Makes Its Final Appearance

The wave of brilliant red flowers marks the end of a centennial of commemorations of the Great War

Washington D.C. in Spring

Cherry Blossom Forecast Update: When Will Washington, D.C. Reach Peak Bloom?

How Flowers Manipulate Light to Send Secret Signals to Bees

Come-hither blue haloes are just one of the effects employed by nature’s first nanotechnologists

The Tulip Folly

There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever

A new movie sets its doomed entrepreneurs amidst 17th-century “tulipmania”—but historians of the phenomenon have their own bubble to burst

This 3D recreation depicts what scientist believe the ancestor of all modern flowers looked like

New Research

What Did the Ancestor of All Flowers Look Like?

Tracing back the genetic tree of flowering plants millions of years, scientists recreate the predecessor of Earth’s flowers

Blue chrysanthemums

New Research

The Scientific Feat That Birthed the Blue Chrysanthemum

In a world first, scientists engineered the flowers to take on an azure hue

Over 60,000 Plants Bloom Inside the World’s Largest Orchid Garden

Step inside Singapore’s National Orchid Garden, a collection that includes 600 newly created hybrid species

The samples of the unspecified species of flower belonged to the Lagenophora genus.

Historical Pressed Flowers Accidentally Destroyed in Australia

The flowers are “literally irreplaceable”

New Research

Why Morning Glories Could Survive Space Travel

The seed of the common garden flower could survive long journeys in space

“Bucky’ and its large leaves

Meet Stinky ‘Bucky,’ the Bulbophyllum Orchid that Shutdown a Smithsonian Greenhouse

Orchid expert Tom Mirenda says history records the stench of this plant as reminiscent of a thousand dead elephants rotting in the sun

The super bloom draped California's Walker Canyon in a riot of colors.

Cool Finds

California’s Lush Super Bloom Is Even More Stunning From Space

Satellite images captured an explosion of flowers stretching across California’s desert hills

Everything's coming up Lego.

Cool Finds

Thousands of Lego Daffodils Are Blooming in Britain

The brick-built botanicals celebrate the UK’s 2017 City of Culture

Amounts of arsenic that were deadly to children and the elderly were easily metabolized by healthy adults, which is one of the reasons it took many people so long to accept that arsenic wallpaper was bad news.

Arsenic and Old Tastes Made Victorian Wallpaper Deadly

Victorians were obsessed with vividly-colored wallpaper, which is on-trend for this year–though arsenic poisoning is never in style

The notorious RPB: the rusty patched bumble bee.

Future of Conservation

The Bee That Breaks Your Heart

Insects are hard-pressed to get protection as endangered species. Can one fuzzy anomaly beat the odds?

The Beast must learn to love someone else and be loved before the last petal falls on the Enchanted Rose in the tale of the new Disney film, Beauty and the Beast

Ask Smithsonian 2017

The Beast’s Enchanted Rose Lasted a Decade. How Long Can a Real One Last?

A Smithsonian expert says the film’s was undoubtedly a hybrid tea rose

Psst--smell my feet.

New Research

Bumblebees May Smell Each Other’s Footprints to Keep Track of Flowers

In a new study, bumblebees were able to discriminate the foot odor left behind by their nestmates, strange bees and themselves

Page 5 of 8