Category: Point of InterestPage 6 of 16
Places of interest around the Gardens
Our current exhibition, British Art Show 8, is well underway here at Inverleith House, as well as at partner venues, Talbot Rice, University of Edinburgh, and Scottish National…
With Valentine’s Day occurring recently it may be apt to recount the story of a nineteenth century Royal visit to RBGE, and tell the stories behind two red roses named in honour of the…
This last week I’ve actually managed to spend a bit of time in the lab, trying to get some gaps filled in a DNA barcoding matrix for simple…
Family: Mimosaceae Description Acacia dealbata is an evergreen tree with noticeably angular shoots and bears true bipinnate filigree effect, blue-green leaves. The highly fragrant pom pom flowers are…
How a particularly grand piece of street furniture such as this one has not been captured on Google Maps I do not know… Almost invisible to the casual…
A trip to the borders ensued for this surveying site – with Peebles being my destination. After a beautiful but rather bumpy breezy trip on the front seat…
In amongst the institutional archives of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh are items relating to the teaching of botany here, including lists of students going back to 1798. …
In early November 2015 we were lucky enough to be asked if we’d take a postgraduate student studying Archives and Records Management at Glasgow University for a two…
The Hydro power scheme at Dawyck Botanic Garden was officially launched on the 19th May 2014 by Fergus Ewing MSP, The Minister for Business, Energy and Tourism. It…
Red powder puff (Calliandra haematocephala) Family: Leguminosae Description: This is an evergreen shrub or small tree of 4 to 5 metres, which will grow as wide as it…
The complex thalloid liverwort Monocarpus sphaerocarpus has been found on two continents, Australia and Africa, separated by around 8,000 km of mostly ocean. The green plants themselves are…
The relative structural simplicity of some groups of mosses can disguise their uniqueness, especially when simplified features have evolved multiple times within the same family from ancestors with…
Although the exact relationships between the earliest land plant lineages are not yet well resolved, there is consensus that liverworts are one of the most ancient land plant…
One of the earliest plastid genomes to be sequenced, in the late 1980s (Ohyama et al.), was that of Marchantia polymorpha, one of the commonest liverworts around town,…
Rather a while ago, back in 2003, we started working on a phylogeny of the complex thalloid liverworts at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (as a Molecular Phylogenetics…
Back in 2014, staff in the molecular lab and herbarium at RBGE greatly enjoyed a three-week visit from Austrian Dr Wolfgang Hofbauer. With funding from the EU SYNTHESYS…
The specimen of Sorbus microphylla agg fruiting profusely in the copse was collected in the Langtang National Park area of Nepal. This is the area devastated by the…
In memory of Lance Corporal William F. Bennett (1889-1915), Private Alan Menzies (1894-1915), Lance Corporal John Stewart (1891-1915) and Private George H. Stuart (1891-1915) In August 1914, RBGE…
By mid-May 2015, we had 32 separate Inga umbellifera libraries, 15 generated using the Illumina Tru-Seq Nano library preparation kits, and 17 with the NEBNext Ultra library preparation…
Sadly, although not surprisingly, I was not able to amplify the regions of Monocarpus DNA needed to compare it to other complex thalloid liverworts from a 1950s collection that we had…