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Despite the past week of storms, rain and battering inclement weather this scandent Delphinium sp. has proved resilient. It has sparse growth but from this is thrown a…
Zoë Goodwin, who first arrived at RBGE as an MSc student, became a member of staff, and is now a PhD student (University of Oxford), has just published…
The idea that a story about a male yew tree producing a female branch would go viral and attract massive media attention would have seemed highly unlikely a…
One of the biggest changes to take place in botanic gardens in the 21st century has been the adoption of an expanded social role. Botanic gardens remain about…
The complex thalloid liverwort Monocarpus sphaerocarpus has been found on two continents, Australia and Africa, separated by around 8,000 km of mostly ocean. The green plants themselves are…
Pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo) can be grown in Scotland if you have a reasonably sheltered garden and the summer is not a complete washout! My favourite recipe, which is…
October continued the long quiet dry spell in the first half of the month with unseasonally warm days. The second half of the month was a little more…
The relative structural simplicity of some groups of mosses can disguise their uniqueness, especially when simplified features have evolved multiple times within the same family from ancestors with…
Although the exact relationships between the earliest land plant lineages are not yet well resolved, there is consensus that liverworts are one of the most ancient land plant…
September was another largely dry, bright sunny month, with significant rainfall on only three days. Five more species were added to the Garden’s list, bringing it up to…
One of the earliest plastid genomes to be sequenced, in the late 1980s (Ohyama et al.), was that of Marchantia polymorpha, one of the commonest liverworts around town,…
Rather a while ago, back in 2003, we started working on a phylogeny of the complex thalloid liverworts at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (as a Molecular Phylogenetics…
Image: Duncan Marquiss, Search Film, 2015 (Film Still). Courtesy of the artists. Despite being a quiet spell for observing Sparrowhawk activity in the garden, it is still possible…
We have just had a facinating week visiting communities and wild places across Scotland with three Sami guests from the Far North of Sweden. Greta and Linn Huuva,…
The Fortingall Yew in Perthshire is a tree of international renown as potentially the oldest individual tree in Europe. It has been suggested that it could be as…
Inverleith House presents two artist films that consider the natural world and scientific enquiry as part of a new short season of screenings reflecting upon the gallery’s unique…
To tie in with the launch of ‘Plants from the Woods and Forests of Chile’, we wanted to look at some of the material from our herbarium and…
I have had some good encounters with Sparrowhawks over the last few weeks. I posted about one fairly recently and in the last couple of days I also…
Back in March I wrote a blog ‘wild food Sami style’ about a new book and film about Sami chef and food ambassador Greta Huuva. Now Greta, her…
Back in 2014, staff in the molecular lab and herbarium at RBGE greatly enjoyed a three-week visit from Austrian Dr Wolfgang Hofbauer. With funding from the EU SYNTHESYS…