sent Cephalotaxus to Europe where it was received with interest and appreciation.2 Siebold grew five different Cephalotaxus in his own garden in Japan, along with many other plants he had discovered, cultivating them for their beauty and for evaluation as garden plants. Today, although plum yews are widely considered some of the most beautiful and useful of evergreen conifers, their potential a...

I close my eyes and think of a future world. A visionary world, thirty, forty years from today. A world not of new humanity but a plethora of old and new humanities. A world where more than one of way of being human is not only the norm but is considered essential for the very survival of our species. This is the world as a garden. Gardens, by the very fact that they are gardens, consist of a m...

Worldwide, changing climates and land use practices are escalating woody-plants encroachment into grasslands, reducing biodiversity and altering ecosystem functions. The loss of alpine grasslands is a major conservation concern as they harbor many rare and endemic species. Alpine meadows in Northwest Yunnan, China, represent a global biodiversity hotspot with high species richness, beta diversi...

Recently, a dwarf bamboo species,Sasa kurilensis; Poaceae, has invaded into alpine snow-meadows in the wilderness area of the Taisetsu Mountains, northern Japan. This dwarf bamboo species has a wide distribution range from lowland to alpine sites of snowy regions. Because of the formation of dense evergreen culms and an extensive rhizome system, other plants are excluded following invasion by t...

Violets of the sections Melanium were examined for their colonization by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). Heartsease (Viola tricolor) from several heavy metal soils was AMF-positive at many sites but not at extreme biomes. The zinc violets Viola lutea ssp. westfalica (blue zinc violet) and ssp. calaminaria (yellow zinc violet) were always AMF-positive on heavy metal soils as their natural ha...

Grazing and fencing are two important factors that influence productivity and biomass allocation in alpine grasslands. The relationship between root (R) and shoot (S) biomass and the root:shoot ratio (R/S) are critical parameters for estimating the terrestrial carbon stocks and biomass allocation mechanism responses to human activities. Previous studies have often used the belowground:abovegrou...

For the first time to our knowledge, we report here methane emissions by plant communities in alpine ecosystems in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. This has been achieved through long-term field observations from June 2003 to July 2006 using a closed chamber technique. Strong methane emission at the rate of 26.2+/-1.2 and 7.8+/-1.1microg CH4 m-2h-1 was observed for a grass community in a Kobresia hum...

Variations in elevation limit the growth and distribution of alpine plants because multiple environmental stresses impact plant growth, including sharp temperature shifts, strong ultraviolet radiation exposure, low oxygen content, etc. Alpine plants have developed special strategies to help survive the harsh environments of high mountains, but the internal mechanisms remain undefined. Kobresia ...

Environmental gradients have been postulated to generate patterns of diversity and diet specialization, in which more stable environments, such as tropical regions, should promote higher diversity and specialization. Using field sampling and phylogenetic analyses of butterfly fauna over an entire alpine region, we show that butterfly specialization (measured as the mean phylogenetic distance be...