Daring Botany (Biology TODAY‪)‬

I have just turned 60 and have decided to begin an exploration of the plant world. This is really an embarrassing thing to admit: that I've been a biologist for 40 years and I've finally turned my attention to the organisms responsible for life on earth as we know it. I have definitely suffered from "plant blindness" (Allen, 2003), though it hasn't been quite absolute. I loved to garden with my mother, I keep coming back to investigations of the life and work of the plant morphologist Agnes Arber (Flannery, 2005), and for the past two years I've been taking courses in botanical illustration at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). But this spring, two things happened that really took the scales off my eyes. First, I was invited by Ethel Stanley of Beloit College (a "real" botanist) to do a joint presentation on Seeing Plants: Visualization in Plant Biology at a BioQUEST educational symposium (http://bioquest.org/BSA2007). This was to be held in July before the Botany and Plant Biology Joint Congress in Chicago. It was definitely hubris on my part to accept this invitation, but Ethel assured me that I could concentrate on the visualization part and she would do the "real" plant biology. Plant Morphology