The Damascus rose has survived empire, crusade, and civil war. Now it faces a heating planet, and the question of who gets to claim it...

What the photographs alone could not fully show was the scale of what the rose is now up against. Syria sits at one of the sharpest edges of the climate crisis. Rainfall levels during the 2024-2025 season were about 60% below the annual average, while wheat production, down 40%, left a shortage equivalent to what would feed 16 million people for a year. The rose harvest followed the same trajectory. Where 270 hectares were cultivated with Damascus roses before 2011, only 120 remain planted today. Rose plants that should live 60 years now last 25, their lifespans shortened by heat and erratic rainfall.

The photos in this story are great

4 June
IMG_4921.jpeg Home again
2 June

Long before a child has gained the ability to decode the written word, they have already learned plenty about the world visually. “I saw Quentin Blake talk about visual literacy, and he brilliantly illustrated this,” explains Ed Vere, creator of Waffles & Julius and an illustrator who has spent years working with teachers through his Power of Pictures programme. “He asked some children what ‘indignant’ meant. Of course, nobody knew. And then he quickly drew this indignant old lady, and every child exactly understood. It wasn’t just ‘angry’ or one of those black-and-white emotions. They all got the subtleties from his drawing.”

Interesting story about picture books

1 June
IMG_4898.jpeg Finally experienced Uluru in person. Painted on the bonnet of our car
1 June

Jonn Elledge has a great post showing something I talk about regularly as data journalist - the most interesting thing about a number is often how we conceptualise or define it, rather than the number itself.

The length of the Amazon river, in this case. And whether it is longer than the Nile:

The issue at the root of this particular row involves the knotty question of where a river starts. The source of the Nile has traditionally been given as Lake Victoria...

...The problem is that it’s very obviously no such thing. The water in lake Victoria doesn’t just appear there out of nowhere, but generally comes from other rivers which flow into it...

Knowing which tributary to measure is far from the only difficulty. There are problems at the other end too: when, exactly, does a river stop being a river and become instead the sea? “Where it starts being tidal” seems momentarily a good, objective answer – until you realise it means the big watery thing flowing through London should no longer count as the Thames.

28 May
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