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Students’ Stories: “George Herbert Cave” by Dean Blake, 3rd Year Horticulture with Plantsmanship student at RBGE

George Herbert Cave of Windsor, southeast England (1872-1965), was a botanist and plant collector who rapidly rose to prominence in the Victorian era. He collected plants in Sikkim…

Postcards from the Biomes: Using air layering as a propagation method.

Read Marc Gilbert’s full article on air layer propagation here. Discover more from our other articles and journals here.

Growing in Plain Sight: Women in the British Lichen Society Archives

A version of this article was first published in the British Lichen Society 2023 Bulletin no 123, pp 29-33 In March 2022, material from the British Lichen Society…

Golden jewel

The marsh saxifrage (Saxifraga hirculus) is a golden jewel of our bogs and marshlands. Each small plant bears one or two flowers, bright golden yellow and often dotted…

Stories from the Biomes: The Fern House Decant

In 2022, the Horticulture team fixed their attention on the Ferns and Fossils Glasshouse, home to an impressive species diversity from an ancient group of plants. Read about the successes and challenges of moving this collection, from one of the team who carried out the work.

Scottish Plant Recovery

This is an exciting time for threatened plant recovery as new opportunities are emerging through ambitious large-scale nature recovery projects Aline Finger, Scottish plant recovery project lead Early…

One in a thousand

Caught in the process of unfurling its first pair of leaves, this newly germinated wych elm seedling looks delicate. But it is in the vanguard of a new…

Towards 3 million specimens: Caroline Henry

Written by Rebecca Camfield, one of the members of our digitisation team. During digitisation you come across many interesting treasures and stories. This is just one of them….

Next gen elms

Seeing the next generation doing well gives us hope for the future, and this goes for plants as much as people. This is particularly true when the plants…

New Archives Acquisition: the MacWatt Primula Papers, with thanks to Elizabeth Farquharson (1915-2023), the remarkable daughter of a distinguished horticulturalist

A post by RBGE Research Associate Dr. Helen Bennett In April 2023 we were visited at RBGE by Elizabeth Farquharson with her daughter Katharine Trotter, to gift her…

The South Indian cereal drawings of P. Mooroogasen Moodelliar

During my work on Hugh Cleghorn I became very interested in the Madras School of Art, the first of its type in India, established on 1 May 1850…

Two liliaceous drawings by Stella Ross-Craig

Stella Ross-Craig (1906–2006) is best known for her unsurpassed, uncoloured, pen and ink Drawings of British Plants (1948–1973). However, she was also an accomplished painter in watercolour. From…

Planting with Nature – A guide to sustainable gardening

Kirsty Wilson Herbaceous Supervisor at RBGE and BBC Beechgrove TV presenter has written a new book that will be launching on 20th April all about how we can…

Digging into the details through digitisation: the poppy family

Our current programme of digitisation, funded by the RBGE Foundation, seeks to digitise 420,000 specimens from our collections leading to 1 million records (approximately one third of the…

Grow and Magnify: An Illustrator’s Journey with Mycologists and Fungi

By Carole Papion My journey around Edinburgh Botanic Gardens started about four years ago, where in 2018 I enrolled in a practice-based PhD at the Edinburgh College of…

The Wardie Cottages: the deaths of Edward Forbes and John Goodsir

Intrigued by the recent Botanics Story concerning letters from the anatomist John Goodsir to his Edinburgh University professorial botanical colleague John Hutton Balfour, and involving their mutual friend…

Stories from the Biomes: My Experience with the Biomes Decant, by Horticulturist Szymon Drozdek

It all started with one houseplant. That one plant, a Crassula ovata (money plant), led me to having one of the healthiest obsessions human beings can possibly have;…

Alchemists and gardeners

Professor Sandra Díaz is one of the world’s most influential scientists: professor of ecology at the National University of Córdoba, senior researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical…

A tangled Calcutta-Caledonian web: James Kerr, John Fleming and John Hope’s engravings of asafoetida

One of the few benefits of getting older is that, assuming one still has one’s marbles and keeps one’s eyes open, new evidence can crop up and fall…

Narrowing down Aneura pinguis

The thalloid liverwort Aneura pinguis (L.) Dumort. (basionym Jungermannia pinguis L.) has been reported from a bewildering range of climates and habitats, from neotropical cloud forests to Scottish…