Flora and Friends - Your botanical cup of tea

Is tea your cup of tea? 🍵⁠

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Even if it's coffee, this new episode of the Flora and Friends podcast will blow your mind. Have you ever reflected about the fact that 300 years ago tea, coffee, chocolate and tobacco were only arriving in the Western world? ⁠

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In my interview with Hanna Hodacs and Annika Windahl Pontén from @uppsalauniversity we've explored the history of tea, its trade between Europe and Asia and Swedish botanist Carl von Linné's connection to the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. ⁠

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Enjoy this episode with your favourite hot beverage!

Have you ever heard about bioart? Did you know that microbial biofilms and fungal cultures on Petri dishes can become pieces of art?

All this and much more you can discover in my interview with Uppsala based artist Amanda Selinder.

In her work Amanda fuses her background in fine art and her passion for textiles and natural pigments with her curiosity for biological processes. The latest outcome were fascinating pieces of artwork that give a glimpse into the life and biology of endophytic fungi isolated from leaves.

In this podcast interview we talked about

- How her interest for fine art emerged

- How she discovered bioart and what can be done with it

- Why she decided to go back to university to study biology

- How she dyes silk with natural pigments from fungi

- How this arts project has developed into a scientific study

Brew yourself a cup of tea and enjoy this interview!

During the last two episodes we have shared clues with you about the Christmassy mystery plant and here we reveal which plant it was and what the clues were referring to. With me in this podcast today are Melissa and Delphine, my friends and partners at Flora-L Design.

Listen to our December podcast episodes and make your guess which plant we are talking about.

Listen to our December podcast episodes and make your guess which plant we are talking about. We’ll reveal the first hints in this episode and some more on December 15th.

In this second part of my interview with fungal photographer Stephen Axford and documentary filmmaker Catherine Marciniak, Stephen and Catherine share stories from their travels to Asia and other places in the world. We talk about

- whom they have met there

- how they contribute to fungal awareness internationally

- what their recent productions are and where you can find them

- which books about mushrooms they recommend

- what their favourite mushrooms are

Do you think they have a favourite one after documenting all that fungal beauty and diversity? Brew yourself a cup of tea and discover their answer!

In this episode you listen to my interview with Stephen Axford and Catherine Marciniak who are absolutely passionate about fungi, photography and film-making. Stephen and Catherine have been travelling their home country Australia and the world in the past 10 years to document mushrooms in pictures and their growth in time-lapse movies. In this first of 2 parts of the interview you will learn

- How they fell in love with fungi

- How they developed their documentation of fungi in photographs and in motion

- What led them to collaborate with researchers

- Why fungal documentation can be an important resource to people

- How it is as a non-scientist to contribute to science

In this podcast interview, which is in Swedish language, I talk with ecologist Janolof Hermansson, who has for many years inventoried and studied lichens both in Dalarna in Sweden and in Russia about:

- what lichens are

- why it is so difficult to define their composition without modern technology

- what conditions they require to develop

- what their function in our ecosystem is

- how human activity impacts lichens

- what you need to go on your own lichen discovery adventure

- what it needs to increase our knowledge on lichens

Fungi form a large underground network in our forest soils that has important ecological functions for the growth and health of the forest ecosystem. In this solo-episode with Judith Lundberg-Felten, we take a deep dive underground and explore

- How old beneficial fungus-plant interactions, also called mycorrhiza, are.

- How trees and fungi can benefit from entering into a symbiotic (beneficial) relationship.

- Why they matter for the forest even today.

- What the risk of deforestation is for the forest ecosystem.

My guest Julia Carlsson is one of the project leaders for the EU project Life taiga, that reunites 14 county administrative boards in their mission to enhance forest values and biodiversity through controlled forest burning. In this interview Julia shares

- what the benefits of controlled forest burning are

- how it is done

- how controlled burning is used in other areas of the world

- where you can visit sites of controlled burning