Category: Other NewsPage 31 of 51

Stories not categories under anything else

November 2015 Garden Wildlife Report

November began as October ended, quiet and mild. However after the first few days there was an abrupt change when a series of Atlantic depressions brought gales and…

More power from Dawyck Hydro.

The Hydro power scheme at Dawyck Botanic Garden was officially launched on the 19th May 2014 by Fergus Ewing MSP, The Minister for Business, Energy and Tourism. It…

Calliandra ( red powder puff)

Red powder puff (Calliandra haematocephala) Family: Leguminosae Description: This is an evergreen shrub or small tree of 4 to 5 metres, which will grow as wide as it…

Getting Ready for Schools in the Botanic Cottage

  As the opening of the Botanic Cottage is fast approaching props and resources are being made and tested for the new school programmes which will open for…

Have I Got News for Yew

The idea that a story about a male yew tree producing a female branch would go viral and attract massive media attention would have seemed highly unlikely a…

How can botanic gardens grow their social role?

One of the biggest changes to take place in botanic gardens in the 21st century has been the adoption of an expanded social role. Botanic gardens remain about…

Lost before found: Was there more than one species in Monocarpus?

The complex thalloid liverwort Monocarpus sphaerocarpus has been found on two continents, Australia and Africa, separated by around 8,000 km of mostly ocean. The green plants themselves are…

Gardener’s Kitchen – Pumpkins

Pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo) can be grown in Scotland if you have a reasonably sheltered garden and the summer is not a complete washout! My favourite recipe, which is…

October 2015 Garden Wildlife Report

October continued the long quiet dry spell in the first half of the month with unseasonally warm days. The second half of the month was a little more…

Delongia, a new moss genus named after David Long

The relative structural simplicity of some groups of mosses can disguise their uniqueness, especially when simplified features have evolved multiple times within the same family from ancestors with…

Rates of change in liverwort genes

Although the exact relationships between the earliest land plant lineages are not yet well resolved, there is consensus that liverworts are one of the most ancient land plant…

September 2015 Garden Wildlife Report

September was another largely dry, bright sunny month, with significant rainfall on only three days. Five more species were added to the Garden’s list, bringing it up to…

Oh blast – there’s more to life than Marchantia polymorpha

One of the earliest plastid genomes to be sequenced, in the late 1980s (Ohyama et al.), was that of Marchantia polymorpha, one of the commonest liverworts around town,…

Scientific progress, continental drift and glaciers: The history of a paper on the complex thalloid liverworts

Rather a while ago, back in 2003, we started working on a phylogeny of the complex thalloid liverworts at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (as a Molecular Phylogenetics…

Sami ethnobotany – Pine and Birch

We have just had a facinating week visiting communities and wild places across Scotland with three Sami guests from the Far North of Sweden. Greta and Linn Huuva,…

Autumn Screenings at Inverleith House: Anne-Marie Copestake and Duncan Marquiss

Inverleith House presents two artist films that consider the natural world and scientific enquiry as part of a new short season of screenings reflecting upon the gallery’s unique…

Sami wild food experts visit Scotland

Back in March I wrote a blog ‘wild food Sami style’ about a new book and film about Sami chef and food ambassador Greta Huuva. Now Greta, her…

Hidden diversity in unexpected places – moss growth on modern building surfaces

Back in 2014, staff in the molecular lab and herbarium at RBGE greatly enjoyed a three-week visit from Austrian Dr Wolfgang Hofbauer. With funding from the EU SYNTHESYS…

New leafhopper species for Scotland found at RBGE

On 17 September 2015 I photographed a leafhopper on alder (Alnus glutinosa) next to the small pond near the Botanic Cottage site. The leafhopper had a very distinctive…