Author: Max ColemanPage 1 of 8

Restoring a fern wiped out by collectors and botanists

Oblong woodsia (Woodsia ilvensis), a small, rare mountain fern, was virtually wiped out in the Moffat Hills by commercial collectors responding to the Victorian craze for ferns –…

Bird burglar caught in the act

Burglary at the Botanics may sound shocking but every spring there is an outbreak of crime. The burglars go about their business with impunity in broad daylight and…

Seedlings of hope

On Thursday 25 January 2024, 43 people gathered at the Little Assynt Tree Nursery, near Lochinver, making a hopeful start to the year by planting elm trees. Elms…

Planting healthy

…biosecurity has become central to conservation in recent years and the benefits of investing time and resource into producing biosecure plants will pay dividends… Matt Elliot, RBGE plant…

Reviving Benmore’s giants

Reviving a stressed 50m tree feels daunting but having 49 ailing giant redwoods to revive has been one of the biggest challenges. Peter baxter, curator, benmore botanic garden…

Rainforest elm

Awareness that Britain is a rainforest nation is finally growing. Environmental organisations are doing their best to get Britain’s rainforests the recognition they deserve. But one man, Guy…

Resilient plant communities

Diversity is the basis of resilience. But we tend to focus on the number of species or habitats and not the diversity within a single species. This is…

Apple recovery bears fruit

The apple is a symbol of fertility in Norse and Germanic pagan tradition. So, there is some irony in the fact that work by the Scottish Plant Recovery…

Plants moving on

I imagine that releasing a red kite or a golden eagle as part of a species reintroduction programme is a pretty emotional moment. That animal, raised in captivity,…

Plants on the move

Plant blindness – the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment. Elisabeth schussler & James wandersee, 1998 Surprisingly, for me at least, some people…

Pressing conservation issue

It’s the season of mellow fruitfulness and the Scottish Plant Recovery project team has been busy squashing the bright orange/red berries of the Arran whitebeams (Hedlundia species) to…

Restoration in focus

Recovery of threatened plant populations requires attention to a lot of small details and sometimes this includes working with things that are literally small. Flowers can be small….

Hedlundia in a spin

Taxonomists – those who classify and name species – are sometimes grumbled about by gardeners because familiar plant names are changed, apparently out of the blue and for…

Golden jewel

The marsh saxifrage (Saxifraga hirculus) is a golden jewel of our bogs and marshlands. Each small plant bears one or two flowers, bright golden yellow and often dotted…

Scottish Plant Recovery

This is an exciting time for threatened plant recovery as new opportunities are emerging through ambitious large-scale nature recovery projects Aline Finger, Scottish plant recovery project lead Early…

One in a thousand

Caught in the process of unfurling its first pair of leaves, this newly germinated wych elm seedling looks delicate. But it is in the vanguard of a new…

Next gen elms

Seeing the next generation doing well gives us hope for the future, and this goes for plants as much as people. This is particularly true when the plants…

Wake-up call to climate change

The reality of climate change is that we will lose almost all our large wych elm trees after a long history in the British Isles spanning some 9,000…

A small plant with a big genome

The small adder’s-tongue fern has a single leaf not much bigger than your little fingernail. Apart from this easily overlooked leaf, the only other visible part of the…

From a single tree to a BioBlitz

On the 17 and 18 June 2022 naturalists and the public came together at Little Sparta, a garden in the Pentland Hills 25 miles southwest of Edinburgh, to…