Category: Point of InterestPage 6 of 16
Places of interest around the Gardens
In the past I have written about botanical ‘swagger prints’ – large-format illustrations commissioned at least in part to boost the ego of the commissioner. At RBGE (from…
In order ‘to explore, conserve and explain the world of plants’ we need to build up our collections, both of living plants and herbarium specimens, especially from under-collected…
Here at Inverleith House we are very much enjoying Pablo Bronstein’s botanically-inspired artwork, The Birth of the Skyscraper from Botanical Architecture, 2015 (detail), and Early Industrial Landscape, 2016…
Bertha Chandler (1885-1961) In 1901 did Andrew Carnegie know, by donating $10 million to create the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, that his legacy would assist…
In March 2016 we remembered the life of George Blackmore, a man who worked at RBGE as a labourer until the beginning of the First World War in 1914….
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…