This year, the Journal of Horticultural Science & Biotechnology (JHSB) celebrates its 100th birthday. The first issue of the Journal, then called the Journal of Pomology was published in 1919. The Journal was initially published approximately quarterly and during the first few years, slippage meant that there was more than a year between some volumes, and it was in 1945 that the journal started to be published regularly in annual volumes. Hence in 2019, we are celebrating the centenary with volume 94.
The Journal is one of the oldest Plant Science journals and the JHSB plans to mark this milestone with a number of features and special issues. Readers of the hard copy and on the website will see that the 2019 volume has the 100th anniversary cover. We also plan special virtual issues that include a collection of selected past papers from the journal, highlighting research areas where the JHSB has published key research findings, and also a collection of new reviews presenting retrospective and future viewpoints on horticulture that will be published in the individual issues of volume 94.
The first of these reviews in this issue is by Professor Ola Heide. In its early years, the JHSB published papers from the UK and its commonwealth countries. Professor Heide was one of the first, if not the first, author from outside this group, when he published his first article in 1963, thus marking the broader internationalisation of the journal. Since then he has been a regular author and reviewer for the journal. The review, entitled ‘Juvenility, maturation and rejuvenation in plants: adventitious bud formation as a novel rejuvenation process’ provides a fresh perspective on plant juvenility, one of the classic topics in Plant Physiology. Understanding juvenility is of direct relevance to horticultural crops from ornamentals, though vegetables, to tree and fruit crops and it is a highly appropriate topic to be the first of the ‘centenary reviews’.