A young specimen of Colutea cilicica, native to SW Asia is flowering well in the border behind the new alpine house. An unusual genus to find in cultivation,…
In contrast to the very dry spring (March to May), June 2017 was officially the wettest-ever June recorded at the Botanics, with over 180 mm (7.11 inches) of…
Listeners to Radio 4’s Food Programme will have head the fascinating account of the Hadza, East Africa’s last group of hunter gatherers with a diet of 95% wild…
Rapid developments in high-throughput sequencing platforms are providing a step change in the recoverability of DNA sequence data from natural history collections. Short-read massively parallel sequencers are intrinsically…
Ever wondered how plants have evolved to defend themselves? If you were a plant how would you stop something eating you? Poison? Spines? Pretending to be something else? …
Looking at the capture plates from the two DNA extraction protocols that were tested on our QIAcube, it was fairly obvious that a lot more plant fragments and…
One of the amazing things about the polymerase chain reaction, PCR, is how little starting DNA is needed, with an exponential increase in the number of copies of…
Having got together two plates of tubes with little bits of plant and lichen tissue in them, and pulverised them with tungsten beads in a TissueLyser for a…
Enigmatic and isolated although it is, it seems that our Australian colleagues have now “got their eye in” for complex thalloid liverwort Monocarpus sphaerocarpus – after many years…
Each year, for the past four years, leaders from industry, government, the third sector and research have gathered in Stockholm for the EAT Forum to look at global…
In the Herbarium at RBGE, we store a huge number of sheets of archival quality paper with squashed and dried plant specimens stuck to them. These have been…
LearnToEngage is an exciting new suite of professional development modules for botanic garden and museum educators in Italy, Portugal and the UK. The Partner organisations developing and teaching…
One of the most historically important plants in RBGE is currently in flower in the Woodland Garden, immediately to the west of the old sweet chestnut tree opposite…
May 2017 continued the dry theme of Spring 2017 at Edinburgh. There were a few wetter days, but the ground remains very dry unless watered artificially. The last…
160 years after the disappearance of young Scottish plant-hunter John Jeffrey, a reimagining of his missing journals finally reveals the truth behind an extraordinary adventure. In 1850, with…
As far as our 2013 RBGE MSc project proposal to generate a phylogeny of Octoblepharum goes, Juan Carlos Villarreal, Noris Salazar Allen and I were clearly not the…
Spring Break’s a big thing in the US, and spring of 2005, Juan Carlos Villarreal and I spent ours on a road-trip down through Louisianna, looking for the…