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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Currently flowering in the Arid Lands house at the Botanics is the Kenyan endemic Aloe springatei-neumannii. This species was described in 2011 from south-western Kenya by Leonard Newton…
Inverleith House is celebrating three decades of contemporary art and botanical exhibitions at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh with a presentation of rarely seen posters and invitation cards…
You study diligently, you consult books, you visit other gardens for ideas on colour and combination then a rampaging Ranunculus invades your border and the most appealing floral…