by Brittany This is Leo (middle). He’s a weiner dog that likes to eat my dad’s pepper plants. I wasn’t there when Leo first tried my dad’s peppers, but my sister said Dad was even angrier than the time we flooded the house ( a story for another time). My dad, the Pepper Lover, loves his peppers (belonging to the genus, Capsium). He likes them really hot but still enjoyable enough to eat. Usually he buys imported peppers from India or Mexico because he can never find any ones

by Rebecca Tonietto Hi! 👋 My name is Rebecca Tonietto and I am one of the founding members of Plant Love Stories - which is why it may come as a surprise that I am completely breaking the rules in this post and not writing about an actual plant. Rather, a community of plants – I am a community ecologist, so bear with me. Had you told the me of yesteryear, picking ticks out of my hair and scraping tens of hundreds of Desmodium seeds off my clothes, cursing the buckthorn thick

by Becky Barak Seed germination is like magic. Seeds seem like nothing. Small, brown, and dry, it’s easy to forget that they’re alive. When I study germination in the lab, I carefully place each seed on a bed of agar to keep it moist, and check on them, usually three times a week, to see which ones have germinated. One day, it’s just a seed. Often, for many days, it’s just a seed. Then, sometimes, I come back and look at it, and there is a tiny structure - the radicle, which