Category: Other NewsPage 12 of 51

Stories not categories under anything else

April 2019 Garden Wildlife Report

April 2019 was a mostly cool month with long spells of chilling winds from easterly or northerly points. However, the Easter weekend (20th-22nd) was hot and sunny, with…

Orchid appears in Living Lawn

Next to the Front Range and within sight of the Library and Herbarium two small squares of lawn have been transformed into flower-rich ‘living lawns’ as part of…

A Blueprint for Wellbeing

One of the workshops at this years Connect with Nature Conference was titled “A Blueprint for Wellbeing”. It was a collaborative experiment between artist Natalie Taylor and medical…

a botanical glimpse

We were delighted to be approached by graduating MA Art, Space and Nature student from the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), Audrey Yeo. Audrey presented a botanical glimpse…

Festival Fun with Frankenstein’s Plants

This year for the first time, the herbarium team ran Frankenstein’s Plants, an event for the Edinburgh Science Festival. Participants were able to build their very own unique…

Towards a European Research Infrastructure for Scientific Collections

RBGE is a partner in an ambitious initiative to create a Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) as a new European Research Infrastructure. This currently includes 115 organisations…

RBGE publication: Guide to Collecting Herbarium Specimens in the Field

In a time of habitat destruction and species loss it is vitally important to ensure that fundamental botanical work is being carried out to identify, assess and conserve…

Connect with Nature and Health

This year’s Connect With Nature Festival at RBGE is all about how people’s lives have become better after they used art to help them connect with the natural…

Taking digitisation to the next level for the Flora of Nepal

The Himalayan region is recognised as one of the ‘hottest’ global Biodiversity hotspots, with a third of all plant species within its range occurring in Nepal. This makes…

March 2019 Garden Wildlife Report

March 2019 continued the trend of above-average temperatures although it was a much more mixed month than February, with some sharp cold snaps and no exceptionally mild spells….

Integration of Glomeromycota slides in to the RBGE collection

The RBGE was donated a large and important collection of specimens of Glomeromycota (arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi) by Dr. Chris Walker. The collection mainly consists of nearly 16,000 scientifically…

The Edinburgh Seven: ‘a true battle for liberty against tyranny’

Round the corner from the Botanical Women exhibition in the John Hope Gateway is a case featuring the story of the Edinburgh Seven. The Edinburgh Seven – Sophia…

Joint digitisation project

We have recently completed a joint project with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Natural History Museum London (NHM), to digitise important genera in the pea and…

Getting started with….Botany

‘Getting started with… Botany’ is an online course that introduces the amazing world of plants. Strictly speaking, it could be described as a beginners’ course, but it’s also…

Exhibition: Botanical Women

I am a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and I have been working at RBGE on a three-month internship funded by the Scottish Graduate School for…

The living fossil

The living fossil is a term used to refer to a particular set of very special species. The original term coined by Charles Darwin in The Origin of…

DNA extraction protocol for long read sequencing; DNA extraction for state-of-the-art sequencing

Kanae Nishii, Michael Möller, Michelle Hart Introduction Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) (or Second Generation Sequencing) and the plethora of associated applications has revolutionised biodiversity research. The dream of…

Salix lanata and Woolly Originals

We collaborated with Sarah Clarkson from Woolly Originals https://woollyoriginals.com/  who created a design based on our herbarium specimens of Salix lanata.   Sarah visited the Herbarium here at RBGE…

February 2019 Garden Wildlife Report

February 2019 was the second successive dry, sunny month at RBGE. Rainfall was only 18.4 mm, slightly more than January’s record low of 12.2 mm but only 39%…

Pearls on the mulch

The closed, rounded petals of Pieris japonica ‘Snowdrift’ are strewn beneath the plant growing in the F beds. Freshly mulched the contrast between the organic layer and these…