#botany

#botany

Silent Friend tells three separate stories, all set in different periods across more than a century, but rooted in the same location: the University of Marburg in Germany. First, we meet a neuroscientist named Tony, played by the Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who's visiting the school as a guest researcher. It's 2020, and when COVID-19 hits, Tony is left stranded on a near-empty campus. Bored and lonely, he stumbles on some online videos featuring a French botanist, Alice, played by Lea Seydoux, and is captivated by her theory that plants have a highly developed consciousness.

As we destroy the environment, we are destroying ourselves, he told an audience at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, held to address global environmental issues. We are part of the web of life, and what we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

Mona Sugata's intricate sculptures are made from cotton fabric, thread, glue, and pigment, materials that hold traces of fragility, heat, and breath.

We know much more about plants than nature in general, but like all other areas, there are so many more unknowns than knowns.

The squirting cucumber, also known as Ecballium elaterium, propels its seeds explosively as internal pressure builds up, forcing a stream of liquid containing seed pods out at high speeds.

“The absolute best time to harvest tomatoes is before they've reached complete redness, at what's called the 'breaker stage' of development.”

Many plants need a pollinator like bees or butterflies, but hermaphrodite plants can self-pollinate or thrive better with help from others in proximity.