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Parassiti e malattie

Pests and Disease in Italy The scrutiny of the plant world has recently fallen upon Italy due to a vicious disease which has destroyed many ancient olive groves….

Summer Roses

The much loved rose is by nature a flower of soft colours ranging from pale creams and lemons to peaches, pinks and deeper reds and crimson. For centuries…

Folded foliage and weighty limbs

Following the prolonged dry period, the rain that we are experiencing now is a welcome shock to plants. The Paeonia lutea reacted to the additional weight of this…

Visit by Master Hai Tao to RBGE

RBGE welcomed Buddhist Master Hai Tao and his entourage on a warm, drizzly day in Edinburgh last week. His visit was primarily to see and officially bless the…

Two Clematis

In an open aspect to the south of the rock garden two Clematis are flowering. Clematis ternifolia, a vigorous grower with lightly scented white star like flowers bearing…

How much liverwort do you need to get 50 μg of DNA?

There’s an exciting project, The 10KP (10,000 Plants) Genome Sequencing Project, that aims to sequence and characterize representative genomes from every major clade of embryophytes, green algae, and…

Botanical campanology

Campanula incurva found growing in the rock garden and producing a mass of large inflated upturned bell shaped white flowers, the texture resembling parchment paper, all from a…

The colourful Herbaceous Border

The Herbaceous Border at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is 165m long and is backed by one of Britain’s finest beech hedges. The border is currently a riot…

Recreating Edinburgh’s potato

Scotland has a global reputation for potato research, and as a producer of quality, disease free, seed potatoes used by farmers. Many people would think that the tattie…

The hot end of the border

The herbaceous border has a group of plants throwing out hot colours. Revelling in the long hot, dry days, this is peak Monarda season. Complementing the Monarda ‘Jacob…

What are ‘Art Forms’ or ‘Macro/ bonsai’ ?

What are ‘Art Forms’ or ‘Macro/ bonsai’ ? They are large plants – predominantly conifers like Pine and Ilex crenata – which have been trained to look like large…

‘Have you seen the octopus?’

‘Hai visto il polpo?’ *Waves arms to impersonate octopus* ‘Its warm today isn’t it mate’ I said while flapping my arms back to him My current boss called…

Lanky by name, Lanky in growth

A fine sight, walking past the rock garden and looking up at the rock mounds populated with the spreading Lilium lankongense. The spread through the area is via…

Unusual fern Lepisorus thunbergianus

I spotted this unusual fern on a shipment that had come to Vannucci from Japan. The 8-20cm long plants were clinging to the trunk and underside of branches…

Protecting Potatoes: Diversity, Domestication and Darwin

Protecting Potatoes is a new plant display with interpretation for summer 2018 at the Botanics. It can be found in the Demonstration Garden and the Temperate Palm House,…

100th birthday for a Himalayan Wild Pear collected by George Forrest

On the 18th July 2018 we celebrate the 100th birthday of the Pyrus pashia tree growing on the Pyrus lawn.

British Council workshop on Valuing Andean Biodiversity

The dry and montane forests of the Andes are vital for the lives of tens of millions of people in western South America. Their socio-economic worth in cycling…

Gazania from Africa

On the alpine wall with no appreciable rain forecast is a bright yellow composite. Baking in the heat and loving the root run through the free draining alpine…

Following Storm Hector

A casualty of Storm Hector was the loss of our mature Medlar, Mespilus germanica. The large canopy was like a sail gusting in the full force of the…

June 2018 Garden Wildlife Report

May’s good weather continued throughout June, which was sunny, warm (hot in the second half) and quite dry. 51 mm of rain fell, only 86% of the long-term…