This week we attempted a live tour of the Garden on our Facebook page with Curator Nick Wray. Of course, despite the driest spring and early summer we can remember, the rain fell down and the thunder and lightening raged. The show went on however, and for those who missed it, here it is in all it’s glory; enjoy!
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It was Georgia O’Keefe who said, ‘When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment’. It’s worth doing this, nature is captivating close up; perfectly packaged and clinically efficient, each flower has an adapted shape and look gleaned over hundreds of thousands of years for maximum productivity. This economy of engineering uses patterns and shapes that are repeated again and again throughout the natural world and dotted all around the Botanic Garden. (more…)
New plant species are discovered all the time. But it is not typical for plants to be discovered in areas that have been meticulously surveyed. Last year, however, a thoroughly unusual species was found on an island in the Kagoshima prefecture, Japan [1]. (more…)
This past weekend, my family and I met with friends in the village of Shipham, in Somerset, for a walk. It was torrential rain, yet we were determined. We dressed ourselves and three children under the age of 10 in waterproofs and set out. We arrived at a local country pub, not more than 3 km away, resembling drowned rats. And as a Canadian living here in the UK, I still marvel at the fact that nobody took one bit of notice at the state of us. It’s what you do. You get wet. You find a pub. You hunker down for a hot Sunday lunch. And you hope it tapers off before you have to head out again. (It didn’t.) (more…)
