By Claire Smith Katharine Murray Lyell’s book, A Geographical Distribution of All the Known Ferns, was published by John Murray (who was also Charles Darwin’s publisher), in January 1870. We know from Lyell’s handwritten catalogue, which is part of the University of Reading Herbarium’s collection, that she was able to amass a large number of ferns. On page 108 of this catalogue she regularly re-calculated the number of specimens required to build up a herbarium containing an example of every fern species known at the time. Lyell’s handwritten catalogue, page 108 shows a calculation of how man ..read more

By Tomos Jones The aim of my PhD is to identify which ornamental plants might become invasive in the future, possibly as a result of climate change. Gardeners have an important role in preventing invasive ornamental plants from escaping gardens, through their choice of plants, adopting good gardening practices and disposing of plants responsibly. This was the message of our gold medal winning #GardenEscapers exhibit at RHS Chelsea Flower Show last year. The premise of Wild about Weeds – as the author puts it “garden design with rebel plants” – is therefore of great interest to me. The book dis ..read more

The Lost and Found Fungi (LAFF) project have been travelling the country, teaching fungal enthusiasts DNA barcoding… With attention to detail, and a little luck, the protocols have been teaching allow you to read the DNA of the life around us. In this particular case Brian and myself of Kew’s Esmée Fairbairn Foundation funded community project have been using the BentoLab to sequence DNA of fungi collected by local enthusiasts. This is a kingdom full of mimics and species complexes and of all known methods to identify them, the most conclusive is reading their DNA. DNA barcoding is a method ..read more

By Claire Smith Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly… But not until Christmas Eve, otherwise you’ll have bad luck! Once your holly (Ilex aquifolium) and other festive evergreens are in place, it is also unlucky to either remove them before, or leave them up after, Twelfth Night. When you do take down your decorations it’s very important to be as careful as possible, lest you be infested not with cheery little Christmas elves, but terrifying goblins. The number that you see is determined by how many leaves you allow to fall to the ground. Robert Herrick (of “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” fam ..read more

By Alastair Culham In 2014 I introduced the food of the gods, Theobroma cacao, as the source of chocolate, that staple of Christmas excess, in the 16th Advent Botany post.  Today, in the second for 2019, I explore Theobromine, perhaps the best known chemical compound in chocolate, and one of the many chemicals that make it so popular. Theobromine, is a xanthene alkaloid like caffeine, and is formed during the metabolic breakdown of caffeine as well as ocurring naturally in cocoa and some other plants.  It reduces sleepiness by blocking adenosine receptors, it dilates blood vessels and relaxe ..read more

Ornamental plants: our future invaders? This seemingly simple question is the focus of my PhD, and I’m asking gardeners to help me answer it. Most of the invasive plants we have in the British Isles originally escaped from gardens (Stace and Crawley, 2015) and that’s why gardeners have an important role to play. The challenge is to identify which ornamental plants – not currently problematic – have the potential to become invasive in a changing climate. So far, over 800 gardeners have reported plants that are invading or taking over their garden. The ‘top three’ plants so far have been: Japane ..read more

By Alastair Culham Welcome to #AdventBotany 2019 and the start of another journey into quirky, curious, hostorical and, above all, botanical information about the plants associated with the winter season. This year I’m expanding on John Warren’s story of Tangerines and virgin birth told in 2015 with my explorations into the identity of the smaller fruited citrus.  I’ve often seen and bought fruit variously under the names Clementine, Satsuma and Tangerine and felt that, to an extent, they were all rather similar.  However I am not the only one to have wondered about the mysteries of Citrus. T ..read more

September 2019 was the start of the school year, as well as the start of yet another year of University for myself! This will be my 8th… I am training to be a teacher of science (particularly biology) in secondary schools on a PGCE (post-graduate certificate of education) course at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU). In a cohort of roughly 140 student teachers, we are lectured on subjects like the history of education, child development, how children learn, health and safety, safeguarding, and lesson planning and observation. We regularly divide into our subject groups and while with m ..read more

Publications can take time – it has been almost six months since I first submitted this paper and years since the start of the research towards it! ‘Enhancing identification…’ is published in the latest Mycologia journal – impact factor 2.7. The idea is to make identifying powdery mildew species possible, fast, and accurate – the stretch of DNA currently used to do this fails to tell the difference between closely related species, but one region trialled in this publication manages it! A selection of images from the publication. Ellingham O, David J, Culham A. Enhancing identificatio ..read more

Here is the poster I delivered at the State of the World’s Fungi (SOTWF) Symposium 2018. This was a grand and audacious event incepted and hosted by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The poster introduced SOTWF attendees to the aims, insights, and progress of the Lost and Found Fungi project to date. The trends shown in the figures continued into 2019 – the final year of five year fund from The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. I presented this poster during interludes of the conference as well as the single slide during a Flash Poster Presentation session – taking in 67 posters in an hour!   Poster ..read more