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A Cleghorn tree trail at RBGE

Walking home though the garden recently, after a hard day in the herbarium, my eye alighted on a small tree that I must have passed many thousands of…

Cleghorn drawings to feature in a forthcoming exhibition

On 23 July a show entitled ‘I still believe in miracles’ will open in Inverleith House. It is a retrospective of the exhibitions of contemporary art, and of…

Coffee (coffea Arabica)

  Coffee Coffea Arabica Family: Rubiaceae Description First introduced to Europe in 1583, the Arabica coffee tree, which grows to nearly 30 feet high, produces a crop of…

From Borneo to the Botanics: When the expedition ends, what happens to a botanist’s collection?

This Blog post was written by Olivia Nippe, a PhD intern who spent three months working in the RBGE Herbarium: The RBGE herbarium contains over 3 million pressed…

Sun lover

Helichrysum aucheri is in flower on the scree. Papery flower heads on 150mm stems. Collected in Turkey but native to greater Arabia. Grown in well drained soil and…

Set in soil at your own risk

A collection from China is growing opposite the pond lawn. Cacalia aff. delphiniifolia (aff. means ‘akin to’ used in plant nomenclature) loves an area of bare soil within…

June 2016 Garden Wildlife Report

June 2016 was gloriously warm and sunny. for the first week, but the rest of the month was cooler and changeable with some spells of quite heavy rain…

Meeting the Prime Minister of Nepal

Whilst visiting Nepal in late June, Mark Watson met the Rt. Hon’ble Prime Minister of Nepal, Khadga Prasad Oli, at his Residence in Baluwatar, Kathmandu. Mark was joined…

Impressions of a workshop: New model systems for early land plant evolution, 22 – 24 June 2016, Vienna, Austria

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days in Vienna, my first visit in 11 years, when I was last over for the 2005 XVII International…

RBGE’s first shark record – a Chamomile Shark

Yesterday morning I came across a caterpillar on a flower-head of Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) ‘Fire King’ in the Herbaceous Border. It had a very complex patterning along its…

Scrophularia landroveri – botanical whimsy

Botanical names have a tendency to be utilitarian, geographical or commemorative, but very rarely are they whimsical. In 1964 however, Per Wendelbo described a new species of Scrophularia,…

One bright, one white

Looking for a splash of colour in the border? Trollius chinensis ‘Gold Queen’ could be the plant you are looking for. An herbaceous perennial growing to a height…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. XI. Some metagenomics of a herbarium specimen

As part of our hybrid capture project, we sampled from an Inga umbellifera specimen that was collected about 180 years ago, by Andrew Mathews, in Peru in 1835….

Franklin Arctic Canadian Collections at RBGE – Part 2

Nordic ‘alimentation noire’: a culinary experiment, RBGE Canteen, 29 June 2016 (a continuation of Franklin Arctic Canadian Collections at RBGE – Part 1). What did the ‘tripe de…

Franklin Arctic Canadian Collections at RBGE – Part 1

The story and fate of the fourth of Sir John Franklin’s expeditions in search of the North-West Passage, on the ships Erebus and Terror in 1845–8, is well…

John Anthony’s photo album – commemorating the Battle of the Somme

The Battle of the Somme commenced at 7:30am on the 1st July 1916, an offensive lasting for 141 days of blood, mud and horror. The first day stands…

The complex thalloid liverwort Aitchisoniella, and its place in the tree of life

The genus Aitchisoniella contains a single species, A. himalayensis, which was described by Pakistani botanist Professor Shiv Ram Kashyap from plants that he collected in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. X. An update.

Last May (the 15th, to be precise), we sent three eppendorf tubes containing Illumina Tru-Seq and NEB-Next libraries constructed from Inga DNAs, most of which had been extracted…

Raspberry ripple

Weigela decora collected in Japan from an area of dense mixed forest containing Cryptomeria japonica and Stachyurus praecox, these were huge parent plants spreading and reaching 4m x…