Category: Other NewsPage 45 of 52

Stories not categories under anything else

From field to lab and back again

As part of the Scottish Plants Project we are trying to understand the propagation requirements of 170 of Scotlands’s most threatened or vulnerable species. We are well on…

Really Wild Veg – Taste, productivity and disease results

By domesticating wild plants to create our familiar crops we have selected desirable traits like disease resistance, yield and flavour. The Really Wild Veg project has been examining…

Patchwork Meadow

Wild plants are not only part of our landscape, they are integral to our culture and history. Plantlife’s unique project celebrates our fascination with wild plants in the form of…

Benmore redwood avenue celebrates 150th birthday

This year is the 150th birthday of the magnificent avenue of redwoods at Benmore. The story behind how this species reached Britain involves a race to bring back…

Lime trees not responsible for bumblebee deaths

The story of dead bumblebees at the Botanics that had apparently been killed by the toxic effect of nectar from silver lime (Tilia tomentosa) http://stories.rbge.org.uk/?p=5319 has taken a new…

BioBlitz records 556 species in Edinburgh Garden

On the 21st June a BioBlitz was run at the Edinburgh Garden. Over a 24 hour period as many species as possible were recorded by around 30 expert…

The search is on….

I had the good fortune last week to be involved in field work in the Scottish Highlands, along with RBGE arborist Paul Mullany and Natsha de Vere from…

Pop Up! Edinburgh

Grow! by Pop Up! Edinburgh is our latest art exhibit which is showcasing unique pieces of glass artwork from 13 various artists. The idea of Pop Up! Edinburgh…

The Oldest Palm in Edinburgh – Sabal bermudana L. H. Bailey (The Sabal Palm)

The Sabal Palm (Sabal bermudana) is frequently mentioned as being the oldest plant in our collection at about 200 years old. A couple of years ago while researching…

Really Wild Veg – August 5 Update

‘Really Wild Veg’ is a vegetable growing trial run by the Edible Gardening Project and four other community gardens – Girvan Community Garden, Good for Ewe, Whitmuir Organics…

I love the smell of herbaria in the morning

I finally got round to visiting the two largest herbarium collections in the UK, The Natural History Museum London (NHM) and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, to work on…

Life in the Garden

With the Fringe here August is one of the busiest months of the year at The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. With jammed packed events, I will be blogging…

Edinburgh’s Garden: Past to Present

The new display in the Library Foyer provides a whistle-stop tour of the history of the Garden with illustrations from the Library and Archive collections of plants that…

Figuring out your Tree

Part 1: The Very Basics The analyses are finally over, you can fill in those blanks in the results section, and really start dealing with all those hypotheses…

James (Jimmy) Ratter Collection labels available online.

As part of the work of the OpenUp! Project, scans of labels from plant collections made by Jimmy Ratter are now available online at http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/Ratter_labels/.

Reaching 1000

With our Big 5 survey running until October, we have finally reached 1000 votes! Voting is still underway and there is still time to vote for your favourite…

It’s all about Palms

I am in the midst of installing our new exhibition The World of Palms, but thought I would take a moment away from our gallery space in the…

Slimey Aliens in the Glasshouses

During the recent BioBlitz mollusc specialist Adrian Sumner discovered an alien snail, Zonitoides arboreus, in the RBGE glasshouses. The diminutive snail, just 5mm across, lives as a wild…

A butterfly! And not a white one!

At our staff conference today Mandy Haggith, poet in residence at the Botanics for the month of July, commented about the lack of butterflies she had seen in…

Healing Gardens

We are now familiar with the idea of horticultural therapy but how does the concept of a healing garden differ from this? I went to Sweden and Denmark…