Dr M says: It’s that time of year again! Last year’s University of Reading MSc Plant Diversity students (class of 2016 pictured above) are just about finishing their dissertations and we are already wishing them well as they get ready to move on to botanical pastures new, while the class of 2017 are soon to be on their way to Reading for a new exciting
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So you’re walking through the grass and at the edge, where it’s all trampled, there’s this yellow clover, or is it, and is it only one? Well in Britain we have at least four common yellow flowered small to medium clover-like plants. Although they all have trifoliate leaves (three leaflets) they are not called clover, at least the commonest common names are not clover
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OK, Listen up plant lovers and botanophiles alike! Stuff like this really doesn’t happen that often, I mean, when did you last have a chance to attend a Dr M Botanical course? Like never, or at least oh so rarely! We are talking hen’s teeth, we really are! So, come on down to London town and join the botanical love and joy at Dr M’s
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It’s Summer, it’s Pimm’s o’clock and of course high time for Dr M’s next ID quiz, this time its garden flowers! This is a first for Dr M, not the Pimms (!) but the garden plants which have not really featured much at drmgoeswild.com. Not that Dr M has anything against garden flowers, far from it, nothing more beautiful and rewarding than a garden, and no
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Dr M says: Your patience is rewarded and here at last is Part the Second of Dr M’s long-awaited Poaceae quiz! Grasses, so the Poaceae song goes, and as Dr M’s students on University of Reading MSc Plant Diversity know well, have “flowers reduced to spikelets strange yet magical”. The grass spikelet is indeed a wondrous thing and has an intrinsic beauty and fascination
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Dr M attended the three day Association of Science Education (ASE), at the University of Reading, and he joined the SAPS stand – Science and Plants for Schools – to talk to educators about how to get teachers and students excited about plants and “generate a culture of excitement about plants!” Dr M took along with him some plants and other resources including a coat stand
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Dr M’s second botany lesson for his MSc Plant Diversity and MSc SISS students was all about getting to know the top-twenty plant families in Britain. Students divided themselves into smaller groups and set out to different parts of the University of Reading campus to collect material of flowering plants and to bring them back to the lab.
Dr M has set his students some homework. Having already started to look at the top-twenty plant families this term, Dr M has asked his students to construct a key to the top fourteen families of dicotyledons (broad-leaved flowering plants).
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’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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