Category: Other NewsPage 14 of 51

Stories not categories under anything else

Hanging by a thread

Jasminum nudiflorum; bright yellow flowers on chlorophyll green stems. This one, a stem layer that caught itself under the fence post and rooted into the mortar joint. The…

Review of the Year – 2018

Following on from a Met Office decreed White Christmas in 2017, Edinburgh had a day of snow and then Storm Dylan blew through on the 31st. Fortuitously, the…

Christmas Island and other ventures – legacy of RBGE gardener David Reid Tait

When I was contacted by Dr Bill Lynch in August 2018 with a query about a former RBGE gardener called David R. Tait and his work for Sir…

Fern Book Presents from Christmas Past – 2

In December 1945 the world was entering its fourth month of‘peace’ after six brutal years of global war. A small sign of that ‘peace’ was the arrival in…

November 2018 Garden Wildlife Report

November 2018 was a rather ‘grey’ month, living up to that month’s reputation. There were only around half a dozen really sunny days, mainly in the first half,…

Two hopeful Hellebores

Agenus of herbs, these two differ in that Helleborusorientalis has no winter foliage and H.foetidus has. H. foetidus isnative to W and S Europe with H.orientalis having a…

Reasons to be cheerful

Seeing these two images of Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ side by side illustrates the change weather can play on plants. Walking around the garden on a wet morning the…

Francis Buchanan’s Bengal Survey botanical drawings and specimens reunited after 203 years

Since September I have been working, on and off, on the fantastic collection of Indian botanical drawings at our sister organisation, Kew. This started out when asked to…

October 2018 Garden Wildlife Report

October 2018 was changeable. The month started off mild, with pleasantly warm days (highest daytime maximum 19.1°C on 10th) but near the end of the month there was…

The Poppy Patch

With the dry, warm weather this autumn the Annual Poppy, Papaver rhoeas, has produced a timely show of flowers to add colour in the lead up to Armistice…

September 2018 Garden Wildlife Report

This Garden Wildlife Report for September 2018 is exceptionally late, for which I apologise; I have been on holiday or otherwise occupied for much of October. Since originally…

Sir Henry Raeburn and Indian Botany

Recently I was looking at the catalogue of the memorable exhibition of Raeburn portraits held in the Royal Scottish Academy in 1997. In it is reproduced a radiant…

Apple Day 10th anniversary

The Apple Day event held in the Botanic Cottage on 6 October was the tenth Apple Day run jointly by the Botanics and the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society….

In memory of Corporal Henry McBeath (1878-1918)

Henry McBeath was from Rogart in Sutherland, born in November 1878 to James McBeath, a farm grieve (foreman) and his wife Johan from Rovie, a farm in Rogart…

Hybrid capture from degraded DNA: the mysterious case of the vanishing libraries

When we’re working out a protocol or troubleshooting, we spend a lot of time quantifying small quantities of fluids, looking at DNA concentrations on the DeNovix, running tapes…

Polytrichum baits: Cutting mosses

We started our lab work on the Polytrichum hybrid baits project on the 1st of October, by normalising some CTAB-extracted DNA with 0.1X TE to 55 µL of…

Generating a phylogeny of Polytrichum using hybrid baits

The current Next Gen Sequencing lab project at the Botanics involves looking at the phylogeny of Polytrichum section Polytrichum, using hybrid capture. Polytrichum commune, photographed by David Bell…

Hybrid capture from degraded DNA: testing bead cleaning on a 50bp ladder

When we made our Begonia libraries, working with (in some cases) relatively small quantities of very degraded DNA, we should have diluted the adaptors. We didn’t. Consequently, we…

Cast to mud

This is the season where worm casts appear on the surface of the lawn. If left and walked or worse, mown over, the squashing, flattening action will result…

Interleaving in the RBGE Collections, Part 1: The Flora of Forfarshire

By Hannah Swan Before publisher’s bindings were de rigueur, texts came in flimsy paper ‘wrappers’, leaving the permanent binding to the new owner. Because of this, many books from…