Category: SciencePage 1 of 29
Latest science blog posts from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
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…
George Herbert Cave of Windsor, southeast England (1872-1965), was a botanist and plant collector who rapidly rose to prominence in the Victorian era. He collected plants in Sikkim…
A version of this article was first published in the British Lichen Society 2023 Bulletin no 123, pp 29-33 In March 2022, material from the British Lichen Society…
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…
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…
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…
Written by Rebecca Camfield, one of the members of our digitisation team. During digitisation you come across many interesting treasures and stories. This is just one of them….
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…
A post by RBGE Research Associate Dr. Helen Bennett In April 2023 we were visited at RBGE by Elizabeth Farquharson with her daughter Katharine Trotter, to gift her…
During my work on Hugh Cleghorn I became very interested in the Madras School of Art, the first of its type in India, established on 1 May 1850…
Stella Ross-Craig (1906–2006) is best known for her unsurpassed, uncoloured, pen and ink Drawings of British Plants (1948–1973). However, she was also an accomplished painter in watercolour. From…
Our current programme of digitisation, funded by the RBGE Foundation, seeks to digitise 420,000 specimens from our collections leading to 1 million records (approximately one third of the…
By Carole Papion My journey around Edinburgh Botanic Gardens started about four years ago, where in 2018 I enrolled in a practice-based PhD at the Edinburgh College of…
Intrigued by the recent Botanics Story concerning letters from the anatomist John Goodsir to his Edinburgh University professorial botanical colleague John Hutton Balfour, and involving their mutual friend…
Professor Sandra Díaz is one of the world’s most influential scientists: professor of ecology at the National University of Córdoba, senior researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical…
A tangled Calcutta-Caledonian web: James Kerr, John Fleming and John Hope’s engravings of asafoetida
One of the few benefits of getting older is that, assuming one still has one’s marbles and keeps one’s eyes open, new evidence can crop up and fall…
The thalloid liverwort Aneura pinguis (L.) Dumort. (basionym Jungermannia pinguis L.) has been reported from a bewildering range of climates and habitats, from neotropical cloud forests to Scottish…
by Michael T. Tracy Housed in the archives of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is the collection of John Hutton Balfour papers which include numerous correspondences of…
At the Natural History Museum I’ve recently catalogued a collection of 314 botanical watercolours made at the Saharunpur Botanic Garden in northern India between 1843 and 1866 for…
This week saw the conclusion of arguably the most significant meeting for biodiversity since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Read our take on COP15 in Montreal, what…