Category: SciencePage 29 of 33

Latest science blog posts from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

The Botanics in WW1 – Display in Library Foyer

You may  be interested to know that there is a small display in the library foyer, just up the stairs from the garden’s memorial, covering our WW1 Roll…

Online Resources for Taxonomic Research

Names and Nomenclature When tracking down published scientific names, and their places of publication, IPNI, The Plant List and Tropicos are the three primary websites. The other listed…

BioBlitz finds hummingbirds at Logan

Well alright not real hummingbirds. The closest thing we have in Britain is the equally spectacular humming-bird hawk-moth. This extraordinary day-flying moth put in an appearance in the…

Kathmandu: Software and Lunch at the Embassy

Although I trained as a botanist, picking up a PhD in Rhododendron in the 1990s, my principle role is now working with information about plants and how we…

Wild Rice in Isleworth, 1790

Looking into the cabinets of the RBGE herbarium never fails to turn up a surprise. Today I was looking for specimens that might have come from the almost…

New plant for Midlothian found in Botanics

Discovery of a plant previously unknown in an area is not what you might expect to happen within a botanic garden. Such places have large managed collections of…

Flora of Nepal Expedition 2014. Impatiens glandulifera (Himalayan Balsam).

We all know this plant too well from colonising river banks, cycle paths and becoming an increasing problem in as an invasive plant in the UK. Its native…

Flora of Nepal expedition 2014 – update

We are all back safe and sound in Kathmandu and after a few very busy days I now have a chance to do this. Since getting back we’ve…

Really Wild Veg – first results and Aberdeen event

Now that we are coming to harvest time we will shortly be able to measure the crops in the Really Wild Veg trials to see how they have…

In memory of Private David Hume (1888-1914)

In memory of Private David Hume, who was killed in action 100 years ago today, on the 26th August 1914, a few weeks short of his 26th birthday….

In search of rust

Small orange/brown pustules on the leaves of plants could be a sign of infection by a rust fungus. James Iremonger, Heriot Watt University Student, will be searching Edinburgh…

Adapting to climate change

In May, Scotland published its first Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Programme –  a set of actions to increase Scotland’s resilience to the impacts of a changing climate. RBGE…

Flora of Nepal expedition 2014 – update

Namaste from Kathmandu. We’ve been in country now for 3 very busy days and are now ready to leave for the field. As with expedition of this nature…

Flora of Nepal Expedition 2014

In a few days time the Flora of Nepal project are about to leave for an expedition to Mid-West of the country. Leading the expedition is Dr Colin…

RBGE at War – Hume and Fallow’s stories

As a fan of eminent plant collector George Forrest (1873-1932), I’d long known that two of his plant introductions had been named after former RBGE gardeners killed in…

Botanics Stories Hosting Performance

As Botanics Stories is a live site we have a third party service monitoring its performance. The two graphs below show the performance over the last thirty days….

Herbarium specimens collected during World War I

4th August 1914 – collections on the day that war was declared between Britain and Germany On the 4th August 1914 the tension was building during the day…

19th Century Recycling

I’ve said this before but sometimes you find amazing things when raking through the herbarium cabinets. I first came across this specimen when I was part of the…

Tea (Camellia sinensis) at the RBGE

Everyone loves a good cup of tea – as evidenced from our Assam tea bush in the Temperate Glasshouse at Edinburgh. As well as living plants at the…

Biodiversity implications of potentially cryptic species: Using the simple thalloid liverwort Aneura as a model

We are hosting a small two-day workshop at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh on the 11th-12th September 2014 to discuss issues around morphologically cryptic species, whether we can…