The transition of journals from hardcopy to online has brought many advantages in terms of immediacy and accessibility, but there are losses too. One great pleasure of being an editor used to be the regular arrival of a box of newly printed copies of the most recent issue of the journal; opening the box to release the distinctive smell of fresh printing ink and binding glue, picking out a copy to feel the weight in your hands (a good indicator of how healthy, or otherwise, submissions were) and, most of all, the first look at the cover properly printed on good-quality board.

This could also be a scary moment, as any mistakes were by then unchangeable. I well remember the mortification of discovering that the printers had decided to ‘correct’ our spelling of ‘Holliday junction’ on a cover (named after Robin Holliday, who first proposed this type of nucleic acid structure) to ‘Holiday’, or the horrid realization that the image of a protein structure on a cover had become flipped at some point and so all the α-helices were erroneously spiralling to the left.

The status of covers may not be as high as it once was, but even an online-only journal such as Nature Plants persists in producing them for use on our website home page, on social media and in a few other non-print outlets. In doing so, we are continually delighted by the beauty and inventiveness of the images supplied by our authors for consideration. A superb example is this month’s cover, designed by our art editor Erin Dewalt from an image supplied by Sharon Greenblum of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Ronan O’Malley of the University of Chicago to accompany their research article, Recruitment, rewiring and deep conservation in flowering plant gene regulation.

The image shows profiles of transcription factor binding sites in the promoter of the phloem sucrose transporter SWEET11 and its orthologues. The promoters come from ten angiosperm species whose most recent common ancestor lived at least 150 million years ago. These stacked traces, showing how ancient and deeply conserved DNA–protein interactions can be, might remind you of a certain iconic album cover — another visual medium that has dwindled in importance since its heyday.

Specifically, Greenblum and O’Malley provided us with an image intentionally reminiscent of the cover of the 1979 album Unknown Pleasures by the band Joy Division. On that cover, the traces were plots of the radio emissions from the pulsar PSR B1919+21, which was discovered in 1967 by the British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell while working at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge, UK. This connection to a classic album cover set us thinking about albums featuring plants on their covers, and we did not have to look too far. The designer of the Unknown Pleasures cover, Peter Saville, also designed the cover to Power, Corruption & Lies, the second album from the band New Order, which was formed by the remaining members of Joy Division following the suicide of their singer Ian Curtis in 1980. The cover features the painting A Basket of Roses by the nineteenth century French artist Henri Fantin-Latour.

Roses appear on a lot of album covers, but not often as the central image. Of these, honourable mention should go to Lana Del Rey’s 2015 album Honeymoon, which has the singer framed against a hedge of large, deep red blooms. Even more striking is the cover of Thin Lizzy’s 1979 album Black Rose, which shows an image of a deep purple flower spotted with red drops of what might well be blood.

Aside from the rose, probably the most common plant to be centre stage on an album cover is Cannabis sativa. Its appearance on a record indicates a countercultural sensibility in the music and brings together such wildly different musicians as Peter Tosh, one of the founding members of Bob Marley and the Wailers, and country legend Willie Nelson. Both musicians placed C. sativa on the covers of their albums; Nelson on his 2005 album Countryman and Tosh in 1976 with Legalize It, a message impossible to misunderstand.

Trees also feature frequently on album covers; they are quite often depicted as old and solitary, emerging from a washed-out, misty environment. Genesis’s 1976 album Wind and Wuthering is a good example of this, but no cover does it better than k.d. lang’s Hymns of the 49th Parallel from 2004: not only a moody tree but also a snowball in flight, courtesy of English photographer and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy.

No discussion of plants and music should ignore Stevie Wonder’s strange and experimental Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants”. This album contains the soundtrack for a 1979 documentary based on the controversial book The Secret Life of Plants published six years earlier, in which Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird consider evidence for such exotic phenomena as plant sentience and communication between plants and animals (including humans). The cover of Wonder’s album features a simple line drawing of a Hibiscus flower (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis).

Although covers of journals, like those of music records, have lost much of their prominence with the rise of digital media, Nature Plants and the other Nature Portfolio journals understand their value and will continue to expend energy and skill on making them things of beauty. We much prefer to use original images that are directly connected to the studies presented in our pages and therefore thank all the authors who have proposed striking pictures from their work. Please keep sending them to us! With your help, our covers can display the beauty of plant science for many issues to come.