This image, “Das umstrittene Graffiti an der Wand des Jugendzentrums in Uetersen”, by Huhu Uet is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Plantcuttings.uk launched on 7th October, 2023, and is one year old. Now, that’s something to celebrate.
Put together in some haste, it no doubt will benefit from some tweaking to look a little more polished and professional [I still don’t know what to do about that blank page…]. But, since it does – more or less – the job that I intended it to, I’m in no hurry to change anything on the site. The main focus has always been on the plants – and their interactions with people – which should come through in the posts, not by way of any glitzy, fancy ‘packaging’ for the site.
Operating the site those past 12 months has been quite a learning experience – and there’s surely more to learn in that regard [e.g. I’ve no idea why I’ve lost the ability to have all my in-text links open in a new tab rather than risk readers navigating away from the site and not being able to return. That facility was present for the first few months of the blog, but has since been lost. I must therefore engage with WordPress’s Happiness Engineers to see if that can be sorted…]
In terms of what’s been posted, I managed to publish an item a week, and aimed for 5 pm on a Friday to give readers a little something for the week-end. Initially, that was not adhered to as I tried to get used to the discipline of writing weekly content. And there was that ‘blip’ when I set a post to publish at 5 in the morning. I apologise to those of you for whom announcement of its publication came through as a sound alert at that unseemly hour in the morning.
Over the year I’ve posted 52 items, primarily on plant ‘news’ items, and book reviews, amounting to >105,000 words. In total, there have been 2 Uncategorised items, 32 Plant Cuttings, and 15 book reviews (which actually appraised about 19 books). Topics covered in the Cuttings have ranged from underappreciated plants (e.g. seaweed, and moss); the shockingly under-appreciated plant organ, the grass ligule; new types of wood; uses of wood – past, present, and phuture; engineering better photosynthesis; vegetarian carnivores; chewing-gum; seed biology; hybrid rice; and Japanese paper. Books reviewed have included such topics as: forensic botany, trees; Darwin the botanist; ethnobotany; plant poisons; Mexican plants; carnivorous plants; palms; and plant blindness. In short, the sort of eclectic mix that – I hope – readers were expecting from Mr P Cuttings.
Overall, writing for the blog has been enjoyable – especially when I’m ‘in the zone’ researching and penning a post. But, it’s also been quite hard to maintain the flow of items. Certainly, there are days when I’m just not in the mood to put digit to keyboard, and no content is forthcoming. But, those moments are – fortunately – fairly few-and-far-between, and my plan is to keep on posting material as long as I find it enjoyable [plus, I’ve just paid for two more years of the blog]. I hope you will also continue to enjoy the variety of content on the site. And if it helps a little to increase botanical literacy in its readers, then it is a job that’s worth doing.
Although I try my best to promote the site (with weekly announcements on Twitter, Bluesky, and LinkedIn), one of the most useful – and exciting – promotional aids about the site is having posts mentioned in TWIB [The Week in Botany], the weekly eMailed “round-up of all the news we’re seeing on the blog and social media. There’s a mix of blog posts, news and scientific papers that are catching our eyes”, produced by Alun Salt for the Botany One blog. Those ‘shout-outs’ are much appreciated: Cheers, Alun! Another bit of publicity for the blog – for which I’m also grateful – comes via mention of the posts in the Feedspot Weekly eMailing. My weekly posts are not always picked up by those sources, which means that the pressure is on to try and make my items as interesting and engaging and talked about on social media as possible.
As always, I’m grateful that anybody finds what I have to say of some interest, and send a heartfelt thank you to all who read the posts – especially those of you who are signed-up to the site(!)
Cheers,
Nigel Chaffey
Plant Cuttings 
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