Botanical University Challenge
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bucbotany.bsky.social
Botanical University Challenge
@bucbotany.bsky.social
2.1K followers 890 following 720 posts
Annual plant knowledge quiz among UK and Irish Universities. For more information https://botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/
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🌸🌼🌿🌱🥬🥦🌾🌍 18th century teapots - decorated to look like cauliflowers! #BUC2026
Two teapots, but with decoration so they look like cauliflowers. White curds over the top, green leaves on spout, handle and part of sides.
November 26, 2025 at 11:06 AM
bucbotany.bsky.social
🌾🌱⚘️🌿🌼🦠 How to make street furniture more attractive. Box of telephone connections - but plants and butterflies! #BUC2026
Sky blue painted street telephone connection box with paintings spreading bellflower and pearl bordered fritillary butterfly.
November 25, 2025 at 11:22 AM
bucbotany.bsky.social
🌱🌾🌍🌺🌿🍁🌏🌎 Coriander, cilantro, used around world in cookery. Leaves & seeds with rather citrus-like flavour & fragrance to many people. Olefactory receptor protein allows us to perceive coriander flavour. Some variations in gene (OR6A2) mean coriander tastes unpleasant, soap & vomit. #BUC2026
3 Pictures, white flowers, round brown seeds, fluted green leaves.
November 24, 2025 at 10:52 AM
bucbotany.bsky.social
🌏🌱🌴🌿🌾🌺🍄🌲🌳 Sago palm or cycad, Cycas revoluta. looks like a palm tree but is a gymnosperm. From Japan originally, now the most widely cultivated cycad. One of several plants used to produce sago. Also grown for its attractive ornamental character. Needs warm or subtropical climate. #BUC2026
Elegant feathery green leaves of a sago cycad against green leaf background.
November 23, 2025 at 11:52 AM
bucbotany.bsky.social
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🐝 Ginkgo (maidenhair tree, Ginkgo biloba) from East Asia. Last living member of a plant order that evolved over 290 million years ago. Humans have cultivated it for centuries. Attractive fan-shaped leaves, bright yellow in autumn before fall off. ##BUC2026
Pictures fan-shaped green leaves, yellow fruit-like seeds, look like yellow cherries (actually sarcotesta). Also of hard inner cream-coloured sarcotesta protecting seed inside.
November 22, 2025 at 3:21 PM
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🌍🌸🌻🌱🌾🌳🪾🍁🥀 New today! Plant of the week from Jess, Izzy & Niamh, all students who have competed in Botanical University Challenge.

They have chosen a very seasonal plant for today, the rowan, also called mountain ash. Now often grown in gardens or street tree in UK and Ireland. #BUC2026
November 21, 2025 at 10:52 AM
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🌾🌱⚘️🌿🌼🦠🚀 #BUC2026 Impressive survival of moss spores, Physcomitrella patens (spreading earthmoss) on outside of International Space Station for 9 months! Vacuum, radiation, dry, too much light, cold. Over 80% germinated when back on Earth. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
Screen grab showing International Space Station above a blue-cloudy Earth.
November 20, 2025 at 9:01 PM
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🌸🌱🌾🌳🪾🍂🐛🐝 Horse chestnut Aesculus hippocastanum, family Sapindaceae. Elegant palmate leaves, tall spikes of large pink-white flowers. In autumn the spiky green fruits with shiny brown seeds, conkers. Used in UK & Ireland for a children's game. Also in early biotechnology to produce acetone. #BUC2026
Green spiky capsules with shiny brown fruit inside.
November 19, 2025 at 9:52 AM
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When and where for Botanical University Challenge #BUC2026? Online 11, 18 & 25 February to select semifinalists from all the teams. Then finals 19 August live at University of Reading. Also 4th Student Botany Festival to 21 August, open to all members of #BUC2026 teams. @drmgoeswild.bsky.social
Pictures of University of Reading - students among campus buildings, plant and insect conservation area, lecture theatre. Text about BUC in Reading 2026.
November 15, 2025 at 9:42 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌿🐝🪳 The core of Botanical University Challenge #BUC2026 is the plant knowledge quiz. See multiple-choice tie-breaker in this year's semifinal. Galls likely for larvae wasp Diplolepis spinosissimae. www.britishplantgallsociety.org Example questions every copy BUC newsletter. Follow QR code.
Picture green leaf with little toothed leaflets. Two have red galls on them. Ruler at side to show scale; lead is about 3 cm long. Grey background. QR code for The Thymes newsletter of BUC, https://botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/
November 13, 2025 at 9:18 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌿🐝🍂 Team from University of Sheffield in Botanical University Challenge first time 2025. Read 'The Sheffield Sporangia' experience in the competition's newsletter, The Thymes. Read more at the QR code or: botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/

More new teams #BUC2026?
Picture 3 young men on a lawn in front of an elegant building.
November 12, 2025 at 10:55 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🌳🐝 Students write about their planty enthusiasms in newsletter of Botanical University Challenge #BUC2026. Latest issue has lichens, plant-fungal-bacterial symbiosis. Get introduced to them!

botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/

More on lichens: britishlichensociety.org.uk
3 pictures of lichens, diagram cross section through. See full article in The Thymes https://botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/
November 11, 2025 at 1:05 PM
bucbotany.bsky.social
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🧪🌳🐝🌿🌳🍅🍞🥦Botanical University Challenge to inspire the next generation of botanists.

University of Nottingham, UK, plans to close Plant Biology for new students from autumn 2026. Current students want to know more. Read more here:

www.change.org/p/reconsider...
screen grab of petition about closing Plant Biology at University of Nottingham UK. Picture of university buildings.
November 10, 2025 at 9:48 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🧪🌳🐝What was the Third Student Botany Festival like? See the highlights video on our YouTube channel!

Lively, informative, scientific, FUN!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmfO...

#BUC2025 #plants #loveplants
November 8, 2025 at 9:07 AM
bucbotany.bsky.social
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌿🐝What do students who participated in Botanical University Challenge think of it? And, if you are a university student in the UK or Ireland keen on plants, why should you participate in BUC2026?

Listen to their own words on YouTube!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8vX...
Word cloud. Words fun, inspiring, knowledge, learning, networking, community are major words.
November 7, 2025 at 10:26 AM
bucbotany.bsky.social
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🐝 Botanical jokes; love them or sigh over them! Always have one in The Thymes. AI tried to interpret the currant one. botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/ #BUC2026
Text: How do you tell if a plant is not a member of the Buxaceae? It is the one thinking outside the box! Picture: a cardboard box and something like a flowering bluebell stuck in a heap of potting compost with a think bubble of a brain, square and lightning symbol inside it.
November 6, 2025 at 10:13 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🧪🌳🐝 An amusing plant-oriebtated seasonal cartoon from UK satirical magazine. #BUC2026
Heap of leaves and 2 clouds thinking of blowing them around.
November 4, 2025 at 11:05 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🧪🌳🐝The amazing team names are a feature of Botanical University Challenge. Where do they come from? Team Pain in the Grass from University of Portsmouth explain in latest issue newsletter The Thymes. #BUC2026 botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/
Team slides of Plantastic Five and Pain in the Grass, from Botanical University Challenge 2025.
November 3, 2025 at 9:48 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🐝 Latest newsletter about Botanical University Challenge is now available on our website. Book reviews, information about #BUC2026, memories of this summer's competition and festival ...
botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/
Masthead The Thymes, images from issue 13. See all at url below https://botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/
November 1, 2025 at 9:15 AM
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🌿🌱🌾🌍🌎🍄👻💮Ghost orchids! Named for appearance, and seasonal for Halloween! Epipogium aphyllum, totally relies on mycorrhiza, fungi around tree roots, for nutrition. Europe and Asia. Dendrophytax lindenii, epiphyte, no leaves but photosynthetic roots. Cuba and Florida only. Both dramatic!!
#BUC2026
Spikes of white flowers in woodland growing through moss. Graceful delicate white flowers descending from spanish moss covered branch.
October 31, 2025 at 9:38 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🐝 Urban plants prefer to live alongside rich people! Result of surveys from around the world. #BUC2026
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Screengrab with urban plants.
October 30, 2025 at 2:34 PM
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Latest issue newsletter of Botanical University Challenge now on our website. Read all about the incredibly tense 2025 competition semi-finals and final.Then relax with the student Botany Festival. The Vegetable Orchestra. Workshops. Garden visits.

botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk/the-thymes/
Masthead of newsletter of Botanical University Challenge.
October 30, 2025 at 12:46 PM
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Botanical University Challenge #BUC2026 is starting! For teams of degree students at UK and Irish univerities or Botanical institutions. Team from University of Nottingham already signed up! First rounds February 2026. @suzieoftraken.bsky.social @herbarium.bsky.social @drmgoeswild.bsky.social
Building with a tower among trees, beyond a lake on a sunny day.
October 30, 2025 at 9:33 AM
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🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌿🍁🍂 Autumn festivals and customs include making corn dollies from the stems of wheat, rye, oats and barley. Now both traditional forms originating in specific localities and new ones. #BUC2025
Pictures of corn dollies - shapes like wreaths, bells horseshoes made from wheat stalks.
October 23, 2025 at 11:47 AM
bucbotany.bsky.social
🪾🍂🍁🌳🌱🌾🌸🌼 Autumn/fall leaves. Once everything useful stored by tree/shrub, leaf itself has to go. Cells change so leaf breaks loose easily. Abscission zone. Deciduous tree now ready for winter storms. #BUC2025
October 22, 2025 at 10:38 AM