SCIENCE IN THE GARDEN

Why is a bonsai a dwarf and why is it natural to clone rosemary? How

come those seeds never sprout? And what has the moon got to do

with it? Can you really water plants in the middle of the day? After he

inherited a large city garden, a scientist began to observe the flower-beds,

lawns and vases through the eyes of the augmented reality of biology,

chemistry, ecology and physics. Between hoeing and experiments in the

laboratory, he was to weed out some legends, transplant the small world

of vases into the large container of planetary phenomena and fertilize

some strange features of plants, both ornamental and otherwise. The

stories and scientific explanations of a year of gardening sprout up

alongside the begonias, blossom on butterbushes and put down roots in

the damp soil, to connect green thumbs with a research point of view,

leading us to examine allotments, gardens and flower-decked balconied

from the perspective of current scientific knowledge on the plant world.