Category: Other NewsPage 12 of 51

Stories not categories under anything else

Origin of the Edinburgh potato

The Edinburgh potato is a small piece of the Garden’s historical association with food crops and food security dating back to the time of our Regius Keeper Sir…

June 2019 Garden Wildlife Report

June 2019 was a showery, often rather chilly month at the Garden for the most part. Total rainfall at the Garden was 78.8 mm — much less than…

Alderflies (Megaloptera): another new insect group for the Garden’s wildlife list

On 13 May 2019, Alan Crawford, one of the wildlife photographers that regularly visit the Garden, photographed an unusual insect and identified it as being an alderfly. There…

Invasive scramblers

This is a truly invasive species, Tropaeolum ciliatum has romped over and swamped surrounding herbaceous plantings in the border to the north of the Terrace café with its…

Scent of seduction

With the flowering of our titan arum for the third time this summer minds have been turning to how we can help our plant, fondly called New Reekie,…

Alfred Wallace and the Tricolored Jewel

When Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace presented their joint paper ‘on the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by…

May 2019 Garden Wildlife Report

May 2019 was both wetter (72.8 mm, 143% of long-term average) and sunnier (188.9 hours, 167% of average) than usual. For the most part it was cool, and…

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…