The site, called I-Neighbors (www.i-neighbors.org), seeks to connect people with others nearby, enabling them to get to know people well enough to trade plant-sitting duties, perhaps, or feel comfortable dropping by for a chat.
She also excelled at the press agent's stock in trade: planting juicy items about clients "canoodling" in darkened booths.
I recently took the F train to Fort Hamilton to trade plants with a total stranger — my two peppers for his two Roma tomatoes.
The solution, of course, is for farmers and researchers to trade plants, using a cacao variety developed in, say, Ecuador to improve production in Côte d'Ivoire, or crossbreeding a specimen from the International Cocoa Genebank, in Trinidad, with one in Indonesia.
They make an instructive comparison with Last Resort: Pawlikowski, a documentary-maker by trade, plants a sense of actuality in his film by harnessing a range of vérité camera styles - juddering close-ups, video surveillance, hidden shooting positions - that achieves a similar, if considerably more fluid, effect.
Buy from nurseries, trade plants with other enthusiasts, or grow your own from seed.
Because of the increasing amounts of traded plant commodities and the associated rise in introduced plant pests and pathogens, network theory has a great potential in plant science.
But these would be costly measures and border inspectors are already overwhelmed by the increasing amounts of traded plant material (van der Graaf and Khoury 2010).
This lack of knowledge on the structure of horticultural and ornamental trade networks makes it difficult to prevent the inadvertent dispersal of plant pathogens and pests together with the traded plant material (Helfer 2014; Schoebel et al. 2014).
Nowadays, traded plants and plant parts are no less mobile than human beings, and changes in the behaviour of the industry in response to plant epidemics are observed also in the trade of plants (e.g. switching from susceptible to resistant plant hosts).
