Introducing a concept: Hortiporn

What is Hortipornography? We can do no better than consult the word’s coiners – Dr. Paul Hewer, now Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Strathclyde University, Scotland, and Professor Douglas Brownlie, at the University of Stirling, Scotland, who originated the term in their paper ‘Constructing Hortiporn: On the Aesthetics of Stylized Exteriors’ (in: Advances in Consumer […]

The, or Some, Ethics of Topiary

If you’re an appreciator of cutting-edge topiary why not check out the Mosaïcultures internationales® exhibition in Montréal, Canada, which features around 50 works created by horticulturist-artists from 25 countries, and runs until September 29, 2013. You’ll find plants, bushes and trees clipped, snipped and cajoled into frogs, sheep, and Madagascan ring tail lemurs. But might […]

Carnivorous, Green Approach to Getting Malaria Mosquitoes

A progress report on a slow, steady approach to controlling malaria: “Using carnivorous plants to control malaria-transmitting mosquitoes,” Jasper Ogwal-Okeng, Mary Namaganda, Godfrey Sande Bbosa, James Kalema, Malaria World, 2013, 4, 10. (Thanks to investigator Bart Knols for bringing this to our attention.) The authors report: “This GCE project set out to develop a novel […]

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