Author: Max ColemanPage 2 of 9

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…

Biodiversity at Little Sparta

The artist Ian Hamilton Finlay created a garden in the hills near Biggar that he called Little Sparta in response to the characterization of Edinburgh as the Athens…

Giants, genomes and true grit

We assign human qualities to animals without a second thought. The wise owl and the cunning fox will produce a smile, even though we know this is just…

Backing nature for climate at COP26

This month the world looks to Glasgow for signs of progress with tackling the climate emergency. Although the negotiations must focus on the transition to a low-carbon economy…

Blazing the apple trail

The Garden’s 2021 Harvest Festival includes a short self-guided trail on the origins and future of the apple linked to work on the Darwin Tree of Life project….

Eat your sea greens

Seaweed has been a traditional foraged food in coastal Scottish communities for as long as people have inhabited the coast. Despite being nutritious and abundant it became associated…

Connecting with plants

Greg Kenicer and Marjorie Lotfi Gill in conversation for Book Week Scotland To mark Book Week Scotland 2020, botanist and author Greg Kenicer from the Garden’s Education team…

#plantrainbow – true blue

Remembering the colours of the rainbow in the correct sequence is a memory challenged easily solved with this little rhyme ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’, giving…

#plantrainbow – Primrose

The primrose, Primula vulgaris, is one of the most evocative and widely-known heralds of spring. If you are lucky enough to know a wild place where this beautiful…

Spread hope and joy with #plantrainbow

The rainbow symbol is used to represent peace, hope, joy, inclusion and diversity. During the current public health crisis, created by the Covid-19 virus, it has also come…

A botanical wild cat

The Scottish native wild apple (Malus sylvestris), like the Scottish wild cat, could be regarded as being under threat from interbreeding with its domesticated counterpart. In the cat’s…