Author: Max ColemanPage 8 of 9
A Record Attempt to stage the world’s largest tree hug, held on Sunday 1st December, has stormed past Forestry Commission England’s 702 tree huggers which is the official…
Tree huggers converged on 11 sites around Scotland on the 1st of December to mark the end of National Tree Week and to try to break a world…
Bamboos are essentially a group of toughened grasses. This particular giant bamboo is known as Bambusa vulgaris. It is an open clump-forming species with striped stems and dark…
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is putting out the call for people to help break the world record for tree hugging. The Garden is joining forces with ten…
Lichens are a specialised group of fungi that are useful indicators of the state of the environment. The loss of various species sensitive to air pollution created by…
If you were in the Garden last week you would have heard the sound of the arboretum team dismantling a large sweet chestnut. It is always a great…
The herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is an archive of preserved plants that is also a hive of activity; botanists busying themselves describing new species or…
Valdivia gayana is a diminutive woody perennial from Chile that could be mistaken for a dandelion when not in flower. In fact, the local Chilean name ‘Planta de…
Holyrood Park is home to a great variety of plants. Among them are some that are relative rarities and these are carefully monitored by the Historic Scotland Ranger…
Apples are a feast for the senses. The variety of size and colour is incredible. Small varieties have fruits little bigger than a golf ball while the aptly…
By domesticating wild plants to create our familiar crops we have selected desirable traits like disease resistance, yield and flavour. The Really Wild Veg project has been examining…
The importance of conserving crop genetic resources, including the species regarded as Crop Wild Relatives (CWRs), is a subject that has featured quite a bit in this blog…
Now that harvest is a major activity in the Demonstration Garden the final crops in the Really Wild Veg project are approaching maturity. This project has been growing…
This year is the 150th birthday of the magnificent avenue of redwoods at Benmore. The story behind how this species reached Britain involves a race to bring back…
The story of dead bumblebees at the Botanics that had apparently been killed by the toxic effect of nectar from silver lime (Tilia tomentosa) http://stories.rbge.org.uk/?p=5319 has taken a new…
On the 21st June a BioBlitz was run at the Edinburgh Garden. Over a 24 hour period as many species as possible were recorded by around 30 expert…
A few weeks ago I was walking through the Edinburgh Garden near the foot of the Chinese Hillside when I was struck by the large number of dead…
‘Really Wild Veg’ is a vegetable growing trial run by the Edible Gardening Project and four other community gardens – Girvan Community Garden, Good for Ewe, Whitmuir Organics…
During the recent BioBlitz mollusc specialist Adrian Sumner discovered an alien snail, Zonitoides arboreus, in the RBGE glasshouses. The diminutive snail, just 5mm across, lives as a wild…
For 24 hours from 6pm on the 21st June experts and the public joined forces to record wild species in the Garden at Inverleith as part of the…