Plant ageing at Kew

I will be giving two talks on the subject of Plant Ageing at a meeting in the Treeworks Seminar series, to be held at Kew Gardens on 17 May 2016 (details here). I’ll be presenting ideas about time, change and mortality. The personal and societal challenges of growing old are topics much in the news these days. The how and why of ageing is a biomedical preoccupation. I will argue that, viewed from the perspective of plants in general, and trees in particular, current models of ageing are of limited general biological applicability. Another subject I’ll address is the relationship between plants and people, as expressed in historical and cultural responses to the lifecycles of the wild and cultivated flora.