Dr M was in Dorset recently and took the opportunity to visit one of the largest and most complex of Iron Age hillforts in Europe, Maiden Castle, whose huge multiple ramparts once protected several hundred residents. It’s an old, old site and excavations famously carried out in the 1930s and 1980s revealed the site’s 4,000-year history, from a Neolithic causewayed enclosure to a small Roman
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Dr M says: It’s that time of year again! Last year’s University of Reading MSc Plant Diversity students (class of 2014 pictured above) are just about finishing their dissertations and ready to move on to botanical pastures new, while the class of 2015 are soon to be on their way to Reading for a new exciting and, if Dr M has anything to do with
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Dr M’s mini-quiz #5 was about the plants used by a spider to support her web? Here they are again: Well the family of the upright monocot (left) was pretty obvious, Juncaceae and the genus Juncus, but which species? You might have wondered Juncus effusus (Soft Rush) but that species has either a lax or compact inflorescence, whilst the plant here has an interrupted
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…said the spider to the … spider! And so to celebrate national insect week (ye\h Dr M knows spiders are Arachnids not Insects but…!) Dr M offers these images of a female spider and her husband (aka lunch) on their web abode outside Dr M’s parlour (aka kitchen!) recently. Dr M is particularly fond of spiders, but, however lovely they might be, Arachnida hardly
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OK it’s a wet soggy Bank Holiday Monday (as usual!) so why not dry yourself off and warm yourself up with Dr M’s mystery plant mini-quiz #3! This is a plant doing rather well in Dr M’s Mum’s garden in the Wye Valley near Chepstow at the moment. Can you get family? genus? species? Close-up image coming a bit later!
2014 marks the first anniversary of eXtreme botany and Dr M is celebrating by embarking on a European tour which tracks a botanical transect from the Czech Republic, through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and from thence to Finland – an eXtreme botanical transect indeed! Day 1 Tuesday was a long day! A very early morning start from Reading, travelling to Luton airport (Lorraine Chase comes to
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As BBC Radio 4 launches “Roots to Riches” a major new 25 part series on Botany and all about the famous botanists of the past like Carl Linnaeus, it is fitting to showcase one of our most youngest botanists here! Dr M’s own major zillion-part new series of botanical “selfies” continues with young botanist George Garnett who, at just 15 years old, is the youngest
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You’ve got to admire the timing, just as UK’s most prestigious botanical research centre, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, faces a public outcry over budget cuts, the new Director Professor Kathy Willis presents not one, not two or three but twenty-five programmes about botany, and all on prime-time BBC Radio 4 – in the hallowed slot just before the Archers!
eXtreme botany heads North to Malham Tarn Field Studies Centre with Dr M and University of Reading Plant Diversity MSc students, this is #2 of Dr M’s MalHam Diary. Day 2 Sunday: In which Dr M, Guest Tutor Hermione and students (and especially the Sedge Queen!) have a good Cyperaceous day! The day was largely spent in, on and around the board walk in the exceptionally floriferous and
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eXtreme botany heads North to Malham Tarn Field Studies Centre with Dr M and University of Reading Plant Diversity MSc students, this is #1 if Dr M’s MalHam Diary. Day 1: Saturday morning and all present and correct (eventually) in our slightly rickety 17-seater minibus, we left for Malham, or as out international group likes to call it MalHam! On board we were graced by the presence
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