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John Jeffrey rediscovered

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…

Santos & Stech’s phylogeny of Octoblepharum

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…

Losing the story with a moss from Panama City

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…

What’s After After the Storm

A hundred years ago, in the Spring of 1917, Europe was in the in the midst of the Great War and here in Edinburgh doctors at Craiglockhart Hospital…

Panamanian mosses from the back of the freezer

Several years back, I postdocced in Barbara Crandall-Stotler’s lab in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. In the late Autumn of 2003, Panamanian bryologist Noris Salazar Allen spent a few…

Perfect green panicles

Walking out of the John Hope Gateway into the Biodiversity garden  this wide spreading specimen of Acer caudatum ssp. ukurunduense is now mature enough to flower profusely. Collected…

April 2017 Garden Wildlife Report

April 2017 started as March had ended: warm and sunny. However, this only lasted a few days and the rest of the month was much cooler and often…

Simon Whatley’s Span Table

Simon Whatley collaborated with furniture maker Jonathan Pang to produce the Span Table one of the pieces currently on show in the exhibition After the Storm in the…

What to do in your Scottish fruit and vegetable garden TODAY!

Ailanthus giraldii

The young growth as bud burst occurs is an intense red. The foliage is divided and this enhances the visual appeal of the emerging new growth. A large…

Strange fruit offer lifeline to rare elms

If you are visiting the Botanics in 2017 you might see some curious objects hanging in the elm trees. This is not an art installation, but in fact…

Fringe

A fine specimen of the evergreen Lomatia hirsuta is awash with flower in the Chilean area to the north of the front range of glass. A multistemmed tree…

An early Geranium

Geranium albiflorum a Eurasian herb that is flowering exceptionally well tucked behind the contemporary Alpine House. A clumping, spreading perennial with a mass of light purple veined flowers….

In memory of Private Duncan Coutts (1892-1917)

Duncan Coutts was born on the 20th June 1892 to John, a garden overseer, and his wife Euphemia (nee Riddel) at Methlick, Aberdeenshire. He was a Probationer Forester…

Thought for Food: Broadening your horizons

Blog by Andy Crofts of the Big Picnic project I think I am an adventurous eater but I’ve always understood that some plants are poisonous and that applies…

Only 12 Seconds To Poop – But Enough Information To Understand An Ecosystem

It may only take a mammal 12 seconds to poop – but poo contains a treasure trove of information about the animal and its environment that can take…

Spring Bird and Garden Walk, 11 April 2017

The following report on this year’s Bird Walk has been supplied by Tamar Duncan. It was a windy day on Tuesday 11th April here at the Royal Botanic…

Original Darwin specimen – Tiquilia darwinii

The Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh dates back over 150 years to the mid-19th century and there are new and exciting specimens still to be discovered…

Prickly phyllodes

Acacia verticillata in flower on the front glasshouse border. A mass of mini citrus yellow bottle brushes. The flowers are a mass of densely packed stamens. The sharp…

Cleaning the Schistidium PCRs

Once we realised that most of our plate of Schistidium ITS2 amplifications had been successful, it was an easy decision to process them all for DNA sequencing. If…