Walking along the south of the Front Range glasshouses the sun lit up the decaying clump of Agapanthus praecox ssp. minimus. The long linear foliage has turned a…
October 2018 was changeable. The month started off mild, with pleasantly warm days (highest daytime maximum 19.1°C on 10th) but near the end of the month there was…
With the dry, warm weather this autumn the Annual Poppy, Papaver rhoeas, has produced a timely show of flowers to add colour in the lead up to Armistice…
This Garden Wildlife Report for September 2018 is exceptionally late, for which I apologise; I have been on holiday or otherwise occupied for much of October. Since originally…
Opposite the Alpine area is a full flowering specimen of Hamamelis virginiana, an autumn blooming species from Eastern North America. Not to be confused with the Chinese species…
On our 2017 expedition to far west Nepal we spent much of our time following a pilgrimage trail. This trail beginning in Martadi and ending at…
The plethora of international connections within RBGE has its botanical and personal perks. In the summer, before starting my second year of the Plantsmanship HND, I spent 5…
Recently I was looking at the catalogue of the memorable exhibition of Raeburn portraits held in the Royal Scottish Academy in 1997. In it is reproduced a radiant…
The torch ginger genus, Etlingera, is distributed from India in the western through SE Asia to Australia and Fiji in the east. Botanical collections made in the 19th…
There’s a first time for everything and last week the RBGE herbarium digitisation team hosted its first WeDigBio onsite transcription event! Worldwide Engagement for Digitising Biocollections, WeDigBio, is…
Magnificent in full autumn colour Lindera obtusiloba has turned evenly butter rich yellow. The exception being the red leaf petioles which are seen when looking closer at this…
On the lawn west of the pond is a young specimen of Fraxinus apertisquamifera, a native to Japan. A deciduous tree to 5 metres height and a wide…
You may have noticed a slight chill to the air and a softer, golden quality to the morning light, which can only mean one thing: autumn is here….
The Apple Day event held in the Botanic Cottage on 6 October was the tenth Apple Day run jointly by the Botanics and the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society….
Henry McBeath was from Rogart in Sutherland, born in November 1878 to James McBeath, a farm grieve (foreman) and his wife Johan from Rovie, a farm in Rogart…
Following on from the rather unpredictable results we obtained from fragmenting duplicate aliquots of CTAB-extracted Polytrichum DNA in the Bioruptor, Isuru cleaned aliquots of IK31 and IK53 using…
When we’re working out a protocol or troubleshooting, we spend a lot of time quantifying small quantities of fluids, looking at DNA concentrations on the DeNovix, running tapes…
We started our lab work on the Polytrichum hybrid baits project on the 1st of October, by normalising some CTAB-extracted DNA with 0.1X TE to 55 µL of…
The current Next Gen Sequencing lab project at the Botanics involves looking at the phylogeny of Polytrichum section Polytrichum, using hybrid capture. The work will form part of…
After testing bead-to-sample ratios of 30:50, 35:50, 40:50, 50:50 and 60:50 on a Thermo Scientific™ GeneRuler™ 50 bp DNA Ladder, using Beckman Coulter AMPure XP beads, we focused…