🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🖌️🐡What is a berry? Botanically, fleshy fruit from single flower with 1 ovary. So, grape, currant, tomato, cucumber, banana & pepper (Capsicum) fruits are botanical berries. However, for culinary use, berries are small, pulpy, and often edible fruit - like strawberries, blackberries! #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 🐡 Dill, herbs related to celery, carrots. Leaves, stems & seeds used for flavouring in cookery, pickles. Originates North Africa & Middle East. Loves hot, sunny weather. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 🐡 Lettuce, mostly grown for summer leaves to eat fresh or cooked. Now major horticultural crop. Also varieties for oil from seeds and others with long edible stems. Many leaf shapes and colours. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 🧪🐡The spice cinnamon is aromatic oils in tree bark & leaves of some species within Family Lauraceae, Genus Cinnamomum. Trees grow in China, SE Asia but traded around the world. The chemicals cinnamaldehyde and eugenol are main reason for flavour. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 🧪🐡 Many plants have mutually beneficial, relationships with other organisms. Frankia alni filamentous bacteria make ammonia, adding hydrogen to nitrogen gas from atmosphere. Cosy home in Alder roots, sugar supply. Tree gets exclusive fertiliser source. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃 🧪🐡🖌️ 2026 final Botanical University Challenge #BUC2026 is in a large lecture theatre at University of Reading. Come and see the amazing teams in person on 19 August! Tickets now available. QR code or botanicaluniversitychallenge.co.uk
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃🐡🖌️The Ginger plant family, Zingiberaceae, provides other spices in addition to ginger. Black cardamom, used like green cardamom, but has different flavour. Seed pods have a strong, camphor-like flavour, often with a smoky character from drying over fire. #BUC2026
Botanical University Challenge
Botanical University Challenge
Botanical University Challenge
Botanical University Challenge
Botanical University Challenge
Botanical University Challenge
Botanical University Challenge
🌱🌾🌍🌺🌳🌲🌿🐡🌴Borage, Borago officinalis, large bristly plant with vivid blue flowers now in UK & Ireland. The flowers were traditionally used to to decorate a gin-based fruit cocktail, Pimm's No. 1 Cup. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌳🌲🌿🍃🐡🖌️ The spice turmeric, from plant Curcuma longa in Ginger family, has its intense orange colour from polyphenols, especially curcumin. This is used as flavouring and colouring in foods, cheese, butter, cosmetics. #BUC2026
🌱🌾🌍🌺🌳🌲🌿🐡🌴 Evolution of Trees. Fascinating – fossils, DNA, physiology, climate change. Speakers Jenny McElwain Trinity College Dublin, Christopher Berry Cardiff Uni & Bill Baker Kew. Teams from all in Botanical University Challenge. Prof McElwain asked questions 2025.
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
Botanical University Challenge
Botanical University Challenge
How trees first arose from small plants and changed the world, and why new trees emerge.
