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Rainforest elm
Awareness that Britain is a rainforest nation is finally growing. Environmental organisations are doing their best to get Britain’s rainforests the recognition they deserve. But one man, Guy...
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Reviving Benmore’s giants
Reviving a stressed 50m tree feels daunting but having 49 ailing giant redwoods to revive has been one of the biggest challenges. Peter baxter, curator, benmore botanic garden Benmore Botanic Garden...
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Planting healthy
…biosecurity has become central to conservation in recent years and the benefits of investing time and resource into producing biosecure plants will pay dividends… Matt Elliot, RBGE plant health &...
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Seedlings of hope
On Thursday 25 January 2024, 43 people gathered at the Little Assynt Tree Nursery, near Lochinver, making a hopeful start to the year by planting elm trees. Elms are important in Assynt as it is one...
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Bird burglar caught in the act
Burglary at the Botanics may sound shocking but every spring there is an outbreak of crime. The burglars go about their business with impunity in broad daylight and thefts are a daily occurrence. The...
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Restoring a fern wiped out by collectors and botanists
Oblong woodsia (Woodsia ilvensis), a small, rare mountain fern, was virtually wiped out in the Moffat Hills by commercial collectors responding to the Victorian craze for ferns – pteridomania – that...
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Elm blossom
If you have ever appreciated elms blooming then you are more observant than most. I don’t mean the splashes of bright green we see in April before most deciduous trees come into leaf. That is the...
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Last Ent set to repopulate Glen Affric
Sometimes individual trees attain what might be called celebrity status. They become widely known for some particular quality or association. This often relates to historical figures and events that...
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A tale of two elms
A new chapter in the 800 year relationship between the people of the Highland village of Beauly and a remarkable wych elm began on Monday 29 April 2024 with the planting of two young elms. In January...
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The elm hunters
Inchnadamph is on the shore of Loch Assynt, at the point where the burn known as the Traligill enters the loch. The hamlet consists of only a few houses and a small kirk surrounded by high hills and...
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In the firing line
Plants taking pot shots at passers by is obviously a fanciful idea. Nevertheless, there is a plant, known as the purple toothwort (Lathraea clandestina), that could be described as a botanical...
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Cow-wheat conundrum
One of the plants in the set of ten that make up the Scottish Plant Recovery project – small cow-wheat (Melampyrum sylvaticum) – is a particular enigma due to its poorly understood interactions with...
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Cow-wheat curiosity: pollination
There’s nothing quite like a mystery for building a sense of curiosity. As part of my preparation for the Scottish Plant Recovery project fieldtrip to Norway in early August I was intrigued by the...
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Norwegian niches: oblong woodsia
Niche is a word that has multiple meanings. Someone might have ‘found their niche’ if they have a particularly suitable job, for example. In ecology the word is a jargon term for all the environmental...
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Uber ants
As part of our work on Scottish Plant Recovery we have been bulking up the seed of small cow-wheat (Melampyrum sylvaticum) in readiness for translocation back to the wild. The aim of this work is to...
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Interpreting fungi in the Garden
The Garden’s Visitor Welcome Team is busy deploying a new set of interpretation panels to highlight the seasonal interest that fungi bring to the Garden. The normally overlooked fungi tend to undergo...
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No more sow-thistle blues
During summer 2024 a small group of staff from the Garden’s Scottish Plant Recovery team, NatureScot and National Trust for Scotland achieved something which would have been unimaginable ten years...
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Scottish Plant Recovery updates
Monthly updates on the progress being made to restore the fortunes of some Scotland’s most threatened plants are now available online. The updates, produced by the Garden’s Scottish Plant Recovery...
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Translocating resilience
Assisting the migration of plants is something that has already been carried out in a limited way to help them respond to climate change. The concern is that some plants are either unable to migrate...
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Elm in it’s place
A story that is told in pictures alone is somehow very satisfying. Nobody needs to be a wordsmith to get the message across. When Chris Puddephatt sent me his latest images of Assynt’s elms I saw a...
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