The Geographer: The Growing Value of Gardens (Spring 2025)

Spring 2025

The magazine of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society

The Geographer

The Growing Value of Gardens

“When you plant something, you invest in a beautiful future amidst a stressful, chaotic and, at times, downright appalling world.”

•Saving the World, One Garden at a Time

•Universities in Crisis, Students in Debt

•Botanics: Outlines and Insights

•South Georgia at 250

•Rare Plants and Garden Restoration

•Pollinators, Pando and a Poison Garden

•Seeds, Solar and Seawilding

• Reader Offer: One Garden Against the World

plus news, books, and more…

Monty Don, garden writer and broadcaster

The Geographergardens

It feels as if we are in a period globally and politically where the world is simply spinning ever faster, so we wanted to try and help slow it down a bit by focusing our gaze away from the macro level, and back to a more micro level. And what better place to focus than on gardens and green spaces, places of beauty and biodiversity, of flowers and fresh air, and renowned for their physical and mental health benefits.

From familiar public and community gardens to seed collecting and plant hunting, there is a great deal happening in the world of plants, pollinators and protection of nature, and we are grateful once again to all of our many contributors for helping us to shine a light on their wonderful work and some of the exciting projects going on around us. It has been a lovely excuse for me to catch up with friends at my old workplace, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Fiona Parker, whom many readers may remember from her time at RSGS, and Suzie Huggins and Alex Davey, who have kindly provided articles. This edition covers other topics too. There are Alastair McConnell’s thoughts as he steps back from chairing the RSGS Education Committee, and some analysis of the current issues in Scottish education. We have insights into South Georgia and river swimming, a letter from an eyewitness to the Californian wildfires, and a look into the shocking state of student debt and university finances. And we have articles about some of the many women who have contributed so much to RSGS and geography, including an interview with the Head of our Collections Team and RSGS Board member Margaret Wilkes.

We hope you enjoy reading it, and that in some way it can offer some brief respite and relief from worries about the wider world.

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS

RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU

tel: 01738 455050

email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org

Charity registered in Scotland no SC015599

The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS.

Cover image: Casa de Pilatos, Seville: clipped citrus trees provide rhythm, structure and shade. © Derry Moore

Masthead: Helenium border. © Mike Robinson

RSGS: a better way to see the world

Fair Maid’s House visitor centre

Housed in the oldest secular building in Perth, the RSGS’s visitor centre is a geographical delight, full of maps, books, artefacts, and many stories. This year, we plan to open our doors to visitors each Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoon from 10th April until late October. So please come along and visit us: we look forward to welcoming you to the Geographical Heart of Scotland! And if you would be interested in volunteering at the Fair Maid’s House, please email us at enquiries@rsgs.org or phone us on 01738 455050.

Voices of the Earth

We are delighted to report that Jo Woolf’s latest book, Voices of the Earth, is now nearing completion and will be published and distributed over the next few months. Thank you to all of our members and supporters who helped to make this possible by contributing towards the book’s development.

This follow-on to Jo’s previous RSGS book, The Great Horizon, contains 30 stories of inspirational individuals who have helped us understand every corner of the Earth and the environments they contain, and many of whom who are still making a difference.

A year and a day for glaciers

The UN has declared 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, and 21st March of each year as World Day for Glaciers. Key areas of focus throughout the year will be raising global awareness about the role glaciers, snow and ice play in regulating the climate and supporting ecosystems and communities; and enhancing scientific understanding and data through programmes like Global Cryosphere Watch.

In 2023, glaciers experienced their greatest water loss in over 50 years, marking the second consecutive year in which all glaciated regions worldwide reported ice loss. With 2024 confirmed as the hottest year on record, this trend is expected to continue.

See un-glaciers.org for more information.

A draft cover design for the new book.

Legacy gifts

As for other small charities in today’s uncertain world, legacies give a vital financial and motivational boost to RSGS, helping us to maintain and progress our work across a broad range of activities, and encouraging us to continue championing the interests of our broad geographical community.

In the second half of 2024, we were heartened to receive two legacy gifts, both unexpected and extremely welcome, from long-standing RSGS members. Gerald John Bontoft made a very generous provision of £10,000 in his Will, after more than 40 years of support as an RSGS member.

Elizabeth Fernie Mitchell left a generous donation of £5,000 in her Will; she too had been a loyal member of our Society for over 40 years, and was a keen attender at our public talks.

We are most grateful to them both for their lifelong and continuing support. With a large and increasing need for our activities and services, their legacy gifts really make a tremendous difference to what we can achieve.

University Medallists

RSGS University Medals are awarded to the outstanding graduating honours geography student in each of the Scottish universities as recommended by heads of department. We are pleased to say that presentations were recently made to two new University Medallists.

Aberdeen: Chelsea Sutherland-Thom, an exemplary joint honours graduate who excelled throughout the Geography honours curriculum. Her dissertation, on the subject of culture-led regeneration and placemaking in Peterhead, Scotland, was methodologically creative and theoretically rich.

St Andrews: Innes Manders, who used his own ecological fieldwork study of the distribution of high-altitude woodland in Norway as an analogue for a ‘rewilded’ future scenario in the Scottish Highlands. His dissertation was ambitious, imaginative, policyrelevant, technically sophisticated, very well written, and rich in observational detail. He won external funding to cover his fieldwork costs, worked effectively throughout, and is now trying to publish his work.

Dr Roddy Yarr FRSGS

In January, we were pleased to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Dr Roddy Yarr, for his outstanding leadership in influencing a wide range of climate change and social responsibility initiatives.

Roddy has long been dedicated to the sustainable development of the city of Glasgow. He held the positions of Assistant Director for Sustainability and Environmental Management, then Executive Lead for Sustainability, at the University of Strathclyde.

Leading the Sustainable Strathclyde team, he drove numerous transformative initiatives to achieve the University’s Climate Change and Social Responsibility Plan and net zero targets. In 2023, Roddy took up the position of Director of Sustainability at the University of Glasgow, where he currently leads the institution’s operational response to net zero, climate resilience and social inclusion.

Blog highlights

Recent additions to our blog include:

A Year of Discovery: Reflecting on 2024 at RSGS. We reflect on the past year at RSGS, and take a moment to thank our members, volunteers, supporters (and staff) for all that they helped us achieve during 2024.

William Speirs Bruce and the Scotia. On the morning of 2nd November 1902, the SY Scotia quietly slipped her moorings at Troon and sailed into the Irish Channel. The Scottish National Antarctic Expedition had begun.

Holding on to empathy amidst division. During a time where it feels like political division has reached overwhelming heights, we consider why it is important to remind ourselves of the value and prevalence of empathy.

Why we need to counter the politics of polarisation. With the current wave of populist ‘anti-science’ rhetoric that is gaining traction around the world, we highlight the need for us to champion science and promote intelligent debate and understanding.

Read these thoughts, plus many more, at rsgs.org/blog

Fraser Stewart FRSGS

In February, we were delighted to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Fraser Stewart, for his efforts towards tackling fuel poverty and championing communityled energy solutions.

Hailing from north-east Scotland, Fraser is committed to ensuring that energy innovations effectively tackle poverty and inequality. He holds a PhD from the University of Strathclyde, where his research focused on the role of local and community energy initiatives in achieving a just transition in Scotland. He is a passionate and eloquent champion of fairness and the importance of energy to more marginalised households.

Celebrating RSGS volunteers

In December, we welcomed volunteers from our Local Groups, Collections Team and the Fair Maid’s House visitor centre to a celebratory event to thank them for all their work for RSGS in 2024. We look forward to working with them throughout 2025.

SGJ success

Our academic Scottish Geographical Journal (SGJ) has been enjoying significant growth. Downloads hit an all-time high of 97,000 in 2023 (2024 figures are not yet available), and the current Impact Factor of 1.3 (based on the number of times selected articles have been cited) is the highest yet, putting SGJ into the second-best quartile for similar academic journals. This is a testament to the considerable efforts of the current editorial team of Chris Philo, Emma Laurie, Rhian Thomas and Martin Hurst, building on the momentum of previous editors.

Current and past volumes of the SGJ (dating back to 1885) are available at www.tandfonline.com/journals/rsgj20. RSGS members can receive print copies of, and online access to, the SGJ for free; contact the RSGS office for details.

Elizabeth Leighton FRSGS

In December, we were pleased to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Elizabeth Leighton, for her decades of work as one of the foremost built environment campaigners in Scotland, informing and influencing the Scottish Government’s commitments to building standards and, more

Alice Morrison in Saudi Arabia

Adventurer and RSGS Inspiring People speaker Alice Morrison hopes to be the first person recorded to cross Saudi Arabia from north to south on foot. Over two winter seasons, the 2,500km journey will take her, accompanied by camels and local guides, through the Kingdom’s vast deserts, oases and mountains.

She aims to make new discoveries, amplify the voices of Saudi women, and shed light on the Kingdom’s climate, landscapes and conservation efforts. By retracing ancient caravan routes, she hopes to unearth hidden stories from the land’s rich history, while offering fresh insights into the rapidly evolving Saudi Arabia of today.

See alicemorrison.co.uk/cross-saudi-arabia-on-foot for more information.

Botanic gardens and wild plants

Research led by Cambridge University Botanic Garden’s Curator Professor Sam Brockington and Deputy Curator Dr Ángela Cano, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution (www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02633-z), has found that botanic gardens are struggling to safeguard the world’s most threatened plants from extinction.

The research team analysed a century’s worth of records (1921–2021) from 50 botanic gardens and arboreta currently growing half a million plants, to see how the world’s living plant collections have changed over time. The results suggest that the collections have collectively reached peak capacity, and that restrictions on wild plant collecting around the world are hampering efforts to gather plant diversity on the scale needed to study and protect it.

Professor Brockington said, “A concerted, collaborative effort across the world’s botanic gardens is now needed to conserve a genetically diverse range of plants, and to make them available for research and future reintroduction into the wild.”

generally, their response to the climate emergency. Elizabeth is the Director of the Existing Homes Alliance, a coalition of environmental, housing and anti-poverty organisations campaigning for the upgrade of existing homes to make them fit for the 21st century, and help tackle fuel poverty and climate change.

A Festival of Shackleton

RSGS’s Festival of Shackleton, held with Dundee Heritage Trust on 5th December, was a wonderful way to end 2024, bringing more than a thousand visitors together at Caird Hall, Dundee. A rapt audience enjoyed an ambitious programme of 14 speakers telling the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s life from 1901 to the present day, over two and a half hours, using a mix of filmed interviews and live presentations. The event proved to be both popular and entertaining, leaving visitors buzzing with excitement. We’ve received some really lovely feedback; thank you to everyone who joined us!

On the day after our public event in Dundee, we had the pleasure of hosting our guest speakers at our HQ in Perth. The group included Dr John Shears, Expedition Leader for Endurance22; John Geiger FRSGS, Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society; Sven Habermann and Kevin Kenny, representatives of the Shackleton Museum in Athy, Ireland; and the Hon Alexandra Shackleton, granddaughter of Sir Ernest. RSGS Writer-in-Residence Jo Woolf and the RSGS Collections Team shared some special items from our map collections and archives relating to Ernest Shackleton, particularly about his role as Secretary and on the Council of RSGS.

Inspiring People

The 2024–25 Inspiring People programme of 90 face-to-face public talks delivered across mainland Scotland allowed RSGS audiences to hear from some brilliant speakers.

January started with bumper audiences for Andy Torbet, an underwater explorer, filmmaker and TV presenter, who shared his incredible stories about a decade of adventures with the BBC. Ed Ley-Wilson joined us to talk about his kayaking adventure into the heart of the sea roads that make up the Scottish Highlands, with a careful observation of the natural world. Professor Roger Crofts asked us to consider what nature means to us at home or further afield, and proposed a Nature Charter for Scotland. Kirsty Fisher shared her account of sailing around the world in a time of fast-paced living and travel, and the importance of enjoying the journey. February began with sell-out audiences to hear documentary filmmaker and historian Paul Murton transport us to some of Europe’s most remote islands, with their stunning landscapes and extraordinary history. Jasmin Paris shared her truly inspirational story of being the first woman to complete the gruelling Barkley Marathon, and her power of self-belief. And underwater photographer Lawson Wood reflected on 60 years of marine exploration and conservation, with some stunning images of the amazing lifeforms to be found around our coasts.

The programme concluded with cyclist Mike Elm sharing frightening and funny stories from his extraordinary seven-month, 8,000km cycle; writer Merryn Glover talking about Nan Shepherd’s explorations of the Cairngorms; climber Anna Wells recounting her journey to become the first woman to complete the ‘Winter Munro Round’; conservationist Tom Bowser exploring the past, present and future of red kites in Scotland; photographer Matthew Phillips sharing stories gleaned from four years working for the British Antarctic Survey in the beautiful and harsh landscape of South Georgia; and Dr Adrian Webb uncovering the significant achievements of those responsible for producing the vast quantity of charts distributed to the Allies during WWII.

suggest speakers

Many thanks to everyone who came to our talks this season; it was fantastic to see so many large and appreciative audiences. We look forward to planning our 2025–26 programme, and hosting everyone again from September. If you have suggestions or recommendations about possible speakers for next season, please contact us at enquiries@rsgs.org

L–R: Mike Robinson, Dr John Shears, Hon Alexandra Shackleton, John Geiger, Sven Habermann, Jo Woolf, Kevin Kenny.

Professor John Gordon, Geddes Environment Medallist

Professor Roger Crofts, RSGS Vice-President

John Gordon hails from St Cyrus, and as a young boy he stood on the clifftop and watched the changes in the beach. His real appetite for geomorphology was stimulated by David Sugden at Aberdeen University; after graduation, he was David’s first PhD student mapping and modelling glaciation.

He went off to Antarctica and started his long association with that continent and its glacial history, with a topographic feature named after him and prizes recognising his work. Back home he was a Geoconservation Specialist with the Nature Conservancy Council, and later with Scottish Natural Heritage. Internationally, he has contributed innumerable papers blazing a trail on how to assess the sensitivity of landscapes to change, the effects of climate change on geodiversity, the values and benefits of geoconservation, the links between geodiversity and biodiversity conservation, the impact of tourism on geoheritage, and cultural connections with geoheritage.

Solar overtakes coal

New data published by energy think tank Ember shows that solar was the fastest growing EU power source in 2024, overtaking coal for the first time. This trend is widespread, with solar growing in every EU Member State.

Coal has fallen from being the third-largest EU power source in 2019 to the sixth-largest in 2024. More than half of EU countries now have either no coal power or a share below 5% in their energy mix. Gas has also declined for the fifth year in a row. Without the wind and solar capacity added in 2024, EU gas consumption for power would have been 11% higher.

Wind and solar have now avoided €59 billion in fossil fuel imports since 2019.

Scotland-by-the-Book

He was awarded RSGS’s Geddes Environment Medal for outstanding leadership in applying and communicating science and good practice to expert, managerial and public audiences, to improve the conservation of geoheritage in Scotland and internationally. I was delighted to give the citation, and the Medal and Honorary Fellowship were presented by my fellow RSGS VicePresident Professor David Sugden, at an RSGS talk in Edinburgh.

Mark Evans and the Jewel of Arabia

Adventurer Mark Evans spoke to RSGS audiences in 2024 about his Heart of Arabia Expedition. In early 2025, he and his team set off on the Jewel of Arabia Expedition, a 30-day journey on foot, by camel and 4x4, following the route taken by British explorer Bertram Thomas in 1928 from Ras al Hadd, the most easterly point of the Arab world, along the coast to Salalah, the second-largest city in Oman. Passing close to many of Oman’s biodiversity hotspots, the expedition used the power of social media, podcasts and photography to tell stories that put a spotlight on inspiring people and amazing places. Learn more at jewelofarabiaexpedition.com

‘Climate-proof’ chocolate

Scientists from University College Cork, the University of São Paulo and New York Botanical Garden have found three species that are close relatives to the plant from which chocolate is produced. The finding has been hailed as an opportunity to produce sustainable, ‘climate-proof’ chocolate, expanding the genetic resources available and opening the door to more drought-tolerant or disease-resistant cacao trees.

Birlinn Books has launched a new app designed for people looking for books connected to a specific area, be that for exploring genealogy, planning a trip, studying, or general interest in a place.

The app brings together books on history, geology, mapping, food and drink, travel, poetry, politics and more, as well as works of fiction. It allows users to browse Scotland by region, exploring books linked to specific landmarks; and to discover book recommendations, bookshops to visit and festivals to attend.

Download the app, available for mobile phone and desktop, from birlinn.co.uk/scotland-by-the-book

Rechargeable batteries from industrial waste

An industrial waste product can be converted into a component for batteries that can stably store large amounts of charge. Researchers at the University of Illinois have discovered a simple process that can turn triphenylphosphine oxide into a useful liquid that could potentially replace lithium and cobalt in battery manufacture.

These redox flow batteries store energy as two liquids in a pair of tanks. The fluids chemically react when pumped into a central chamber separated by a membrane, producing electrons to generate energy. The process can be reversed to charge the battery by placing a current across the membrane.

Potted pests

A study published in the journal BioScience (doi.org/ 10.1093/biosci/biae124), reports how insects, fungi, reptiles, spiders and other invasive pests are being transported across the world among ornamental plants, threatening the natural environment and the agriculture sector. Despite regulations and border checks, imported cut flowers and potted plants present a growing risk because the sheer volume of trade makes it difficult to monitor and control.

Watch a short explanatory video on YouTube (youtu.be/ CgNVA0MIvY0).

Urban firestorms

An article in the journal Nature (www.nature.com/articles/ d41586-025-00141-z) reported that the deadly and destructive fires that struck southern California in January were examples of urban firestorms, fundamentally different from wildland fires. When fires burn in densely populated areas, buildings become fuel: Los Angeles neighbourhoods burned as house after house caught fire. Researchers say that such urban fires are likely to become more common thanks to population trends and climate change.

Factors that drove the intensity of the Los Angeles fires include the high density of homes in steep terrain, powerful winds that fanned the flames, and what a recent paper called ‘hydroclimate whiplash’, an abrupt switch between very wet and very dry conditions that is likely to occur more frequently as the Earth warms. The Los Angeles area had received abnormally large amounts of rain in 2023 and early 2024, promoting plant growth; but then less than 1mm of rain since July 2024, drying the brush and grass into tinder. Meteorological factors are interacting with human decisions. Around the world, more people are moving into the wildland–urban interface, where cities meet natural landscapes. Fires that ignite at these interfaces can spread into purely urban areas with devastating results. As the populations in the boundary zones grow, fires that start there become more likely to migrate into areas that are unequivocally urban, researchers say.

Wildfires in Los Angeles, California

Flora Naylor

On 7th January 2025, a brush fire broke out in the Pacific Palisades. Over the next few days, due to high winds, dry conditions, and an unusually warm winter, a total of nine fires broke out, 29 people died and over 12,000 structures were destroyed. Emergency workers and vehicles, coming from across the state and other states and countries, worked tirelessly to combat and contain the blazes. The loss is unimaginable.

I live in the centre of LA, relatively sheltered from fires that broke out. Living through the LA fire from my relatively protected enclave was a strange experience. It was a weekday, so I was working, but with a persistent panic. I could not do anything to stop the fires, so I sat and worked, constantly checking for updates, as my world literally burned.

A couple of times, I stood on the roof of my apartment. The wind causing the rapid spread of the fires whipped around me, slamming a heavy metal door. I saw the smoke spreading out over the city and ocean like an oozing fog. At night, I could see the orange flames lick the hills.

The constant panic made it hard to sleep. So much was happening, and I would wake up and obsessively check my phone for the next update and the potential call to evacuate.

Over 200,000 people evacuated the fires. People opened up their homes and offices to welcome those who had been displaced. I made a ‘go bag’ and thought about what I should bring. Ultimately, it was mainly clothes, important documents, and all the necessary items to safely transport a cat who absolutely hates being in her crate. But how do you choose? I forgot to grab books with old inscriptions from relatives, pictures carefully sourced from flea markets, photos not yet digitised.

The fires have stopped, but the damage remains. Some estimate that it will take years to clean up the toxic debris caused by the fires. And many more years to rebuild. In some senses, life moves on. Reminders exist. Restaurants offering free meals to first responders. The Pacific Coast Highway, a road I’ve driven countless times, remaining closed with a constant police barricade, only letting emergency vehicles through.

The impacts of climate change are here. I’ve lived through earlier-than-usual hurricanes in Houston, winter freezes in Houston, atmospheric rivers in LA belting down more rain than in the last several years, and now the fires. I’m 25, but can track the changes to the climate over my lifetime. Because when I think about the first ten, 25, 50 years of my life, I know climate will affect the places I live, the food I eat and the activities I undertake. And that’s really scary.

The loss is unimaginable. If you have the ability, organisations including the American Red Cross and World Central Kitchen are collecting donations for those impacted by the fire.

Flora

Gardens in times of crisis

Dr Deborah Long, Chief Executive, Scottish Environment LINK

Our gardens are often places of refuge for us. In times of crisis, their use evolves. In World War II, the Dig for Victory campaign turned them into centres of food production for the home and local area. What about now? In today’s nature and climate emergency, how can we use our gardens? Can they build nature and climate resilience to the changes happening to the planet? Can they give us hope and provide us with our own contributions to the solutions?

It has been clear for a long time that nature in Scotland is struggling. The State of Nature Scotland report, produced every three years, has been reporting increasing threats and ongoing decline since 2013. The latest report (2023) documents declines in native species like seabirds, lichens and bryophytes, all Scottish specialities. For the first time, it also demonstrates where Scotland sits in the key measure of biodiversity intactness index. Biodiversity intactness measures how much of an ecosystem’s natural biodiversity remains despite human impacts. Although Scotland is often celebrated for our wildlife, landscapes and seas, Scotland’s biodiversity intactness index puts our biodiversity in the bottom 25% of nations. It tells us that Scotland’s nature is not in a good state to be resilient, and it is vulnerable to climate change and other pressures like land use and pollution.

This is where gardens come in. Our gardens, even small ones, can be havens of wildlife and diversity. Jennifer Owen’s 30-year study into the wildlife of her own suburban garden for flowers and vegetables in Leicester, and the wider-scale BUGS garden wildlife project (Biodiversity in Urban Gardens in Sheffield), both showed that ordinary gardens are home to a remarkable range of wildlife, with a high proportion of native species of plants, invertebrates, mammals, birds and amphibians. They are diverse by dint of the gardeners’ aim to have a wide diversity of plants, ideally with colour and structure throughout the year, with fruit and vegetables too. It is the result of gardeners growing the plants they like, with knock-on benefits for wildlife and nature. Maximising the colour season, through flowers that bloom at different times, brings a longer season of food availability for insects and birds. It helps them find food in increasingly unreliable seasons where, in the wild, species can find themselves out of sync with their food source because spring is too late or too wet.

It’s about more than just what grows in our gardens though. The intactness index reflects the fact that our ecosystems are fragmented. Fragmentation means that species struggle to survive in smaller and smaller patches and, with greater distances between them, they struggle to move to more suitable habitats too. An important solution to habitat fragmentation is nature networks: the Scottish government is signed up to deliver nature networks through its commitment to the Global Biodiversity Framework, with one of its targets to conserve 30% of natural habitats and ecosystems by 2030. That’s a tall ask, and connecting up natural habitats across Scotland is something that land owners, land managers and councils are better placed to do. But at the same time, the potential for gardeners to create nature networks through towns, cities and villages is immense. That doesn’t mean a big change in the way we garden: it is recognising that species like bees, birds, amphibians, hedgehogs move from garden to garden. We then need to make sure they can move and can find the food and shelter they need along the way. It easily turns into a game: if I were a bumblebee, where could I nest? How much food is nearby? Is my larder stocked with my food plants throughout the year or will I starve in early spring? Thinking like a bee helps us become part of the solution to today’s nature crisis.

“Gardens offer us a way to contribute to a solution.”

The same goes for climate. While we watch the USA pull out of the Paris Agreement and commit to damaging the planet further for all of us, it’s easy to lose hope. But there are still things we can do in our patch. While what we can do, at our local patch scale, is not going to solve the climate crisis, it is a contribution and better than succumbing to despair and inaction. Trees and shrubs in gardens are long-term carbon sinks. They generally live for a long time and keep that carbon locked up. Adopting a nodig approach to vegetable growing builds the carbon locked away in soil. Green roofs on sheds or extensions insulate as well as provide habitat for pollinators and slow water runoff into drainage systems, preventing flooding and erosion downstream.

Gardens are playing and will play an important role in today’s world crises. And importantly, they offer us a way to contribute to a solution. They give us hope as well as refuge. The Royal Horticultural Society has lots of helpful information on how to garden with nature and climate in mind.

© Mike Robinson

Growing hope in a changing climate

Kate Bradbury, wildlife gardener and writer

When climate inaction dominates the political landscape and biodiversity declines show no signs of abating, what do we do? Should we give up and resign ourselves to our fate? Or should we fight? And how should we do this?

As I type, our Chancellor is announcing plans to go ahead with a third runway at Heathrow, despite advice from the Government’s own climate advisors. She’s also committed to abandoning protection for bats and newts, amongst other wildlife, to make it easier for developers to run roughshod through our countryside. It seems pointless, at times like this, to write about my garden and the things I’m doing in it to protect species, to mitigate against climate change and absorb CO2. The actions of one gardener in one small back garden will make no difference to the climate and biodiversity crisis at all. But the Royal Horticultural Society estimates there are 30 million gardens across the UK, taking up more land than all of our nature reserves put together. What if all of us stepped up for nature outside our back door? Together we can rewild our landscapes, garden by garden. Together we are mighty.

Every single leaf we grow in our gardens absorbs CO2

The sludge in the bottom of our ponds holds more carbon than the equivalent area of forest. Healthy soils – indeed, functioning, intact ecosystems – are carbon sinks. The preservation of biodiversity is therefore explicitly linked to the climate crisis, and linking our gardens with the wider landscape can help boost wildlife populations (biodiversity) as well as mitigate and even help slow down climate change. We can’t stop climate change but we can use our gardens and other green spaces to improve our local environment to deal

“What if all of us stepped up for nature outside our back door?”

with climate change better. We can use hedges to slow down wind to make shelter belts for insects, we can dig ponds and plant trees to slow the flow of water into sewers to prevent flooding, and reduce the amount of raw sewage deposited into our rivers and the sea by water companies. We can save the lives of bees, birds and hedgehogs by feeding them when natural food is scarce but also giving them the specific help they need when they are in trouble. We can make small fixes to be part of the solution.

My garden is one of several built in the early 1900s, one of a series of terraced homes designed to house railway workers building the nearby main line into London. It’s small: just 40ft long, with plastic grass and paving on either side. But there’s an old coal route that links my garden to others beyond my neighbours, and eventually leads to my local park. This route is well used by a number of species, including frogs, toads, newts, foxes and hedgehogs.

It’s not a large space, but I pack in as much as possible to make it as welcoming to wildlife as it can be. When I bought the house six years ago I planted native trees – hawthorn and rowan – and now watch birds feast on their berries each autumn. I made a huge habitat pile using branches and herbaceous material, that hedgehogs live in, and dug a pond where frogs, toads and newts breed, while bats feed above it at night. There are whirligig beetles and water snails and pond skaters and backswimmers, dragonflies and mayflies. There’s a huge ‘nectar bar’, which provides food for a range of different types of pollinators, along with bee hotels and a bee bank (a large patch of sand) to enable solitary bees to nest. In my front garden I have a tiny native meadow, where skipper, speckled wood and gatekeeper butterflies breed, and bees and other pollinators feast on the wildflowers among the grasses. I have swift boxes in the hope of attracting these majestic birds to nest with me one day.

It’s not much, but my garden is an urban oasis amidst an ever-increasing tide of plastic and paving, while greenhouse gas emissions still rise. And things are changing: people stop me in the street to ask me about my wildflowers, people call me to tell me when a hedgehog found out during the day needs taking to a rescue centre. By creating my garden and talking about the ways I provide habitats for wildlife, I have encouraged others to do the same. It’s not ‘One Garden Against the World’ but 30 million gardens for the planet. Together we can be part of a huge, but gentle, revolution.

Kate Bradbury is an award-winning writer, and author of The Bumblebee Flies Anyway. Her most recent book, One Garden Against the World, has been nominated for the People’s Book Prize (voting is open until 30th April 2025 at www.peoplesbookprize.com). Read more of Kate’s writing at katebradbury.substack.com.

More than a garden

Dr Alex Davey, Deputy Director of Science (Research), Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Safe sites for threatened species

“This Living Collection comprises around 13,000 species from over 160 countries.”

Earth’s biodiversity, upon which human life depends, is in crisis. Up to 40% of plants are threatened with extinction by a combination of factors, including changing land use, overexploitation, climate change, pollution and the impacts of invasive non-native species. The United Nations’ landmark Global Biodiversity Framework, signed by 196 nations in 2022, is a commitment to tackle this nature crisis fairly and collaboratively. It lays out 23 goals for urgent action by 2030, including restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems, conserving 30% of land, waters and seas, and halting human-induced extinction.

Often, extinction risk can be reduced by in-situ protection, and restoration of habitats and ecosystems. However, in some cases more drastic ex-situ action is needed to prevent species extinctions, perhaps because wild populations are too small and fragmented to reproduce and regenerate, are at risk from natural catastrophe such as wildfire or landslip, or remain vulnerable to overharvesting, invasive non-native species or disease.

The world’s botanic gardens – of which there are over 3,200, together holding collections of 30% of all plant species, including 41% of threatened plants – are a key place to start.

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

A prime example is the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), a 355-year-old institution caring for Scotland’s national botanical collections across four sites (Edinburgh, Benmore, Dawyck and Logan). This Living Collection comprises around 13,000 species from over 160 countries, including over 1,000 listed as threatened on the IUCN’s Red List.

As well as providing beautiful green spaces enjoyed by over a million visitors each year, and a resource for learning, training and engagement for all ages, RBGE’s Living Collection is an active part of global conservation efforts, often using pioneering scientific and horticultural methods.

Take the conifers: a third of the world’s 600 conifer species are threatened with extinction, but for these giants of the plant world, building conservation collections containing enough individuals to maintain genetic diversity is a challenge. The solution developed by RBGE’s International Conifer Conservation Programme is to enlist a nationwide network of ‘safe sites’, all growing a few to many threatened conifers. Together these protect many thousands of trees, sufficient to provide security for each species and to support conservation reintroductions if necessary one day.

The International Conifer Conservation Programme works with over 300 partners, from private estates and gardens to public parks, schools and hospitals. RBGE provides the plants, and an ongoing programme of support, checking the plants’ health regularly and advising on their cultivation. Safe sites provide the space, and commit to looking after the plants for the rest of their lives. Some 23,500 trees of over 500 taxa from around the world are now protected in this way, across the UK and Ireland.

The model has worked so well that it is now being expanded to Chile, a global hotspot of plant diversity and long-term collaboration site for RBGE. Working with the NGO Fundación Chilco, RBGE is helping develop Sitios Seguros para la Conservación, a network of ‘in-country ex-situ’ safe sites for Chile’s threatened plants. At the same time, the programme works with local botanic gardens, training conservation horticulturists to propagate and care for their local flora. Sowthistle success

As well as a safehouse for threatened species like the conifers, botanic garden collections are an important resource for active recovery and restoration work. RBGE’s Scottish plant recovery programme brings together expert scientists and horticulturists to rebuild populations of priority rare species.

The work builds on decades of progress with one iconic species, alpine-blue sowthistle (Cicerbita alpina). This striking, 1.5m-tall, blue-flowered daisy is unfortunately extremely tasty (earning it the names ‘bear-hay’ and ‘alpine lettuce’ elsewhere in Europe). Widespread grazing by sheep and deer has almost wiped out the species in the UK, leaving four tiny, isolated populations on inaccessible ledges in the Cairngorms.

RBGE’s conservation geneticists established that the surviving populations were largely clonal with limited genetic variation, hindering natural regeneration from seed. A concerted effort of managed cross-pollination, including bringing in material from more distant Norwegian populations, enabled the team to grow up thousands of genetically variable individuals; variability which will support the plants to adapt to changing climates and emerging pests and diseases they will encounter in the wild.

Over 2,000 plants have now been planted out at more than a dozen new sites in the Cairngorms, each carefully managed in partnership with landowners to minimise grazing, giving a fighting chance of success. Some have already grown large enough to flower and successfully set seed themselves.

Restoration on a grand scale

Although thriving populations of one species like alpine-blue sowthistle are a remarkable and wonderful sight, Scotland’s

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, with its historic glasshouses and Herbarium building.

nature-depleted landscapes need ambitious, habitat-scale restoration with multiple species, supporting populations of fungi, pollinating insects and other animals. This is exactly what the Scottish plant recovery team is now doing: funded by a Nature Restoration Fund grant from the Scottish Government, they are expanding the sowthistle work to a suite of ten plants: five trees, providing structured sites for birds to nest, lichens to grow, and beetles to burrow in, four groundlayer flowering plants supporting pollinators, and one fern, all threatened in some way.

Each species has unique requirements. For instance, three rare hybrid Hedlundia (whitebeam) trees from Arran are propagated by cuttings, micro-propagation, and seed genetically tested to ensure it retains the correct hybrid makeup.

“RBGE’s Scottish plant recovery programme brings together expert scientists and horticulturists.”

Grown into saplings, these will enhance tiny natural populations (for Hedlundia pseudomeinichii only two trees are known anywhere in the wild!).

Wych elm, famously decimated across the UK by Dutch elm disease, is being propagated from the few mature trees surviving in infected areas, in the hope these may have a genetic predisposition to survive the disease. The new saplings will be planted out across Scotland, from the Borders to Caithness. This is a long-term experiment: the trees’ level of resistance will not be known for some 20 years, when they become mature and attractive to the bark beetle that carries Dutch elm disease.

The final tree species is wild apple, threatened by hybridisation with cultivated varieties. Saplings are being grown from seed collected in strongholds of ‘pure’ wild apples in Dumfries and Galloway.

Smaller, but no less important, target species include Britain’s rarest fern, oblong woodsia, all but wiped out by frenzied Victorian collectors; whorled Solomon’s seal, found at only nine sites in Perthshire; and further work on alpine-blue sowthistle.

The final two species exemplify how vital it is to have expert horticulturists as well as geneticists on the team: marsh saxifrage, a wetland species decimated by the drainage of lowland bogs, has never been successfully cultivated before, due to its demand for cool, oxygenated, lime-rich water. The team created a bespoke system based on a tiered cascade of trays, a pond pump and a beer chiller, to provide constant flowing water at the right temperature. The plants are growing well, have produced flowering stems and set seed; the first steps to building up a large, genetically diverse population for translocation into new sites.

The small cow-wheat has also been called ‘Goldilocks plant’ for its extremely pernickety nature. A hemiparasite (producing some of its own energy from photosynthesis but also dependent on nutrients from other species), this small, gold-flowered species needs permanent moisture but mustn’t be too wet or subjected to direct rainfall; it also needs just the right amount of light. An annual, it needs to set seed every year to maintain a population, yet its seeds are so large and heavy that they are dependent on dispersal by wood ants (which are also threatened and now scarce in Scotland).

RBGE’s meticulous horticulture team carried out a series of

trials with different host species and cultivation regimes to find the perfect conditions, and now have thousands of plants growing, producing tens of thousands of seeds, which will be sown directly into the wild to restore Goldilocks to her rightful place in Scotland’s woodlands.

Follow the Scottish plant recovery team on their blog at stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/category/scottish-plant-recovery

It’s not all about the living

Most visitors to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh experience only the 13,000 species in the living collection; in fact, this is the tip of the iceberg. The Garden is also home to a repository containing more than three million preserved specimens of over 200,000 species of plants and fungi. With its oldest specimen dating back to 1697, the Herbarium is an extraordinarily important scientific resource. Each pressed plant is accompanied by crucial information: a collection location, date, and often details of the surrounding habitat or other nearby species. This means they can be used to work out not just species’ identities, but their distributions and how these are changing. We can even track shifting flowering and fruiting times through the decades.

The Herbarium continues to grow by about 30,000 specimens a year, and is used by students, scientists, historians and artists from around the world. The associated digital herbarium, comprising high-resolution images of over a third of the physical specimens, accompanied by their all-important metadata, is available online to all, regardless of where you’re connecting from.

Find out more about the Herbarium collection at www.rbge.org.uk/ science-and-conservation/herbarium/our-collections

Images from top clockwise: Pure wild crab apples are now rare in the UK. | Wych elm seedlings growing in the nursery at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. | Alpine-blue sowthistle flower.

The role of plant hunters in conservation and sustainability

Fraser Cook, Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent at Canterbury,

Bogor, Indonesia

As a botanist working alongside plant hunters (a term commonly used in Indonesia), I often grapple with the dual nature of the term. For some, it evokes the golden age of exploration, with tales of adventurers bringing back exotic flora. For others, it serves as a reminder of a colonial past, criticised for its lasting impact on current practices. But plant hunting is not a relic; it plays a pivotal role in conservation, supply chains, and the value we place on forest products.

The romanticised view of plant hunting and collecting continues to shape modern practices. Frank Kingdon-Ward critiqued the obsession with plant collecting, calling it “a greedy scramble for new species… both pathetic and vulgar.” This fixation on rarity, often at the expense of conservation, still dominates the ornamental plant market.

My research into supply chains, particularly in Indonesia, reveals a feedback loop where plant hunters and resellers are sometimes incorrectly identifying new species, or plants are relabelled without taxonomic accuracy, or often labelled with known wild provenance (KWP), which is an indicator of wild collection. Wild-collected plants, including unidentified species, are frequently advertised as rare and originating from exotic locations such as Peru, Papua New Guinea, or Borneo. This leads to the overharvesting of endemic species, compounded by ongoing habitat destruction in these regions.

in collaboration with IPB University,

$200, a full month’s wages in their rural community. While he saw a one-time financial gain, the buyer will cultivate and propagate the plant, standing to make a return on their investment. While more research exists on value chain analysis in the animal trade, plant hunters have told me there are similar dynamics in the plant trade. Middlepersons in both sectors influence pricing through downstream activities, which can discourage sustainable practices among plant hunters and inadvertently incentivise international resellers.

Another issue is the ‘salvaging’ mindset. International botanical institutions, while focused on ex-situ conservation and plant salvaging efforts, tend to have less project emphasis on in-situ conservation. This informs collectors taking plants from threatened forests, which can inadvertently perpetuate exploitative practices. Terms like ‘salvaging’ can obscure the ethical implications of removing plants from endangered habitats and not involving local communities, underscoring the need for a critical reflection on both the terminology used and the role plant hunters play in ensuring sustainability.

“One project I am developing focuses on collaborating with local growers to cultivate endemic species.”

In my research on e-commerce, I am recording attributes that sellers use, such as KWP and other designations, to increase their market value. I recorded cases where label terms like ‘jungle’ are used by sellers to describe wild-collected orchids, even when those orchids are included in CITES appendices. While certain genera have better protection by regulations, other collectible plants often lack similar oversight. Moreover, the increased use of online platforms during the pandemic has made it easier for plant hunters and resellers to bypass traditional regulations. This further exacerbates the issue of overharvesting, as new species increasingly flood the supply chain with minimal oversight or regard for conservation impact.

It is crucial to understand the socio-economic challenges plant hunters face in low-income rural areas, as these conditions influence their involvement in the trade. Terms like ‘poaching’ and ‘harvesting’ often mask the complex realities faced by plant hunters, who receive fewer benefits from upstream activities due to the role of middlepersons.

For example, in my research I met a plant hunter in Indonesia who sold a rare plant directly to an American buyer for

My research seeks to pilot an innovative approach to support upstream activities with plant hunters who steward forests and sell plants. One project I am developing focuses on collaborating with local growers to cultivate endemic species, integrating unique seller IDs with KWP. This approach draws inspiration from traceability schemes in other trades, linking ornamental plants to sustainable sourcing and cultivation practices.

In parallel, I am conducting a choice experiment to assess whether buyers perceive plants with KWP as more authentic or rare and are willing to pay a premium for them. While KWP is often associated with wild-collected plants, it presents an opportunity to reshape current market dynamics into a sustainable model. Similar practices are already in use for other forest products, such as fruits, coffee and beauty items, sold as premium sustainable goods through fair trade or forest stewardship certifications and bought by people willing to pay.

My goal is to shift the narrative in the plant hunter and horticulture trade to one of stewardship in-situ conservation that improves rural livelihoods. By embracing innovative solutions and fostering community collaboration, we can redefine the plant trade for a new era, one that values plants not just as commodities but as vital components of ecosystems and cultural heritage.

Nature’s dark secrets in The Poison Garden

The Alnwick Garden

What if the most beautiful plants were also the deadliest?

Behind the locked gates of The Alnwick Garden lies a botanical collection unlike any other: The Poison Garden. This extraordinary space is home to some of the world’s most dangerous plants, drawing thousands of curious visitors each year. Its unique allure comes not just from its eerie atmosphere, but from the fascinating, and sometimes frightening, stories behind its botanical residents.

A garden with a dark purpose

The Poison Garden was created in 2005 as part of The Alnwick Garden, the visionary project led by the Duchess of Northumberland. While traditional gardens are traditionally places of tranquillity and beauty, the Duchess wanted something different – something that would spark curiosity and provoke thought.

Her inspiration came from the Medici gardens in Italy, where deadly plants were cultivated for study. She envisioned a space that would reveal the dark side of nature while serving an educational purpose. Today, The Poison Garden achieves that mission, raising awareness about the toxic, medicinal, and narcotic properties of plants that are often taken for granted.

Deadly but fascinating residents

The garden’s collection includes over 100 species of dangerous plants, each with its own lethal story. Among the most infamous is deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna). Despite its elegant purple flowers and shiny black berries, every part of this plant is toxic. Historically, belladonna was used by assassins, and even as a cosmetic to dilate pupils – a dangerous beauty trend.

skull-and-crossbones symbols and the warning “These Plants Can Kill,” set the tone for what lies within.

Guides share enthralling tales of historical poisonings, accidental ingestions, and even modern uses of these plants in medicine and crime. Their stories transform the garden into a living classroom where folklore, science and history intertwine. The sensory experience is enhanced by the plants themselves: some exude strange smells, while others appear deceptively inviting, reinforcing the thin line between beauty and danger.

Educating for awareness

The Poison Garden isn’t just about shock value: it’s also a powerful educational tool. Many of its plants are common garden species that can be found in backyards or public parks. Visitors leave with a greater understanding of the hidden risks lurking in familiar foliage.

“Visitors leave with a deeper appreciation for the complex relationship between humans and nature.”

In addition to poisonous plants, the garden also highlights narcotic species like opium poppies and coca plants, explaining their roles in both traditional medicine and the illegal drug trade. By confronting these topics head-on, the garden helps demystify dangerous plants while raising awareness about substance misuse and public safety.

Nature’s power on display

Another striking yet hazardous resident is the foxglove (Digitalis purpurea). Its tall, bell-shaped flowers make it a cottage garden favourite, but foxglove contains digitalis, a chemical used to treat heart conditions. In the wrong dose, however, it can cause fatal heart failure.

Hemlock (Conium maculatum), the plant responsible for the death of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, also thrives here. Its feathery leaves and small white flowers might seem harmless, but just a small amount can paralyse and kill by shutting down the respiratory system. Perhaps the most chilling of all is Ricinus communis (castor bean plant), the source of ricin, one of the world’s deadliest toxins. A dose as small as a grain of salt can be lethal. Despite this, castor oil derived from the same plant is widely used in cosmetics and medicine; proof that toxicity is often a matter of preparation and dosage.

The garden experience

Visiting The Poison Garden is no ordinary garden tour. Due to the danger posed by its residents, visitors are only allowed inside with a trained guide. The imposing black gates, adorned with

The Poison Garden at The Alnwick Garden is a place where nature’s most dangerous secrets are laid bare. It’s a hauntingly beautiful reminder that the natural world is a source not just of wonder but also of deadly power. Visitors leave with a new-found respect for the plants they thought they knew, and a deeper appreciation for the complex relationship between humans and nature.

So, the next time you admire a pretty flower or tend to your garden, remember: beauty can be deceiving, and nature’s dark side is never far away.

© Sproaty

Restoring the Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Matthew Lidster, Head Gardener, Portrack Gardens

Change is happening apace at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, once described as “a garden like no other.”

While that is open to debate, in the sense that other commissioned ‘Jencksian’ landscapes, sculptures and installations exist, this is the first, devised and created by Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick Jencks at her family home in Dumfries and Galloway. It stands as the inspiration, prototype and proving ground for all that follow.

Now owned by Charles and Maggie’s son John, and still a private garden, organised visits are accommodated through the year, and an annual open weekend is run with the assistance of Scotland’s Gardens Scheme. Visitor revenue is donated to Maggie’s, the cancer care charity set up by Maggie and Charles in 1995.

The garden contains artistic interpretations relating to cosmology and scientific and mathematical principles, in a setting of woods, lawns, meadows and ponds. Originally surrounding a Georgian house, the garden was extended to 30 acres in the 1950s, and contains a large collection of trees and shrubs, giving the contemporary installations and landforms contrast with a diverse, colourful and interesting backdrop.

Much experimentation was required to engineer solutions in the creation of the first ponds and landforms. Some installations now need renovation, so a process of re-engineering new solutions and further experimentation has begun. This time, we are recording how these things are being accomplished!

One notable area is the DNA Garden, which requires replanning and replanting in six sensory areas (the sixth being women’s intuition). We began renovating one area per year; these areas are intensively planted, so this is both a daunting and an exciting task, with solutions requiring ingenuity. We are moving away from blight-ridden Buxus (box) to include a greater variety of herbaceous perennials and shrubs, each linked in some way to the sculpture around which it is planted.

biodiversity. An ecological survey was undertaken to inform land management decisions and processes. By knowing what flora and fauna are present, we can evaluate existing habitats and identify potential gaps so those can be filled.

There are Rhododendron ponticum shrubs, probably planted as named Rhododendron varieties and selections but on grafted rootstocks. Without vigilance over the years, those rootstocks have suckered and outgrown those desired selections. In time, the low-growing branches creep and root along the ground, creating large stands of a single clone. Despite the problems that come with them, they afford privacy and shelter, so we aim to replace them with different evergreen shrubs.

We must seek less potentially problematic alternatives that will not change the character of a planted space in a negative way. By using native evergreens such as Buxus (box), Ligustrum vulgare (wild privet), Quercus ilex (holm oak) and Ilex aquifolium (holly) in its many attractive forms, areas can be planted with greater variety, replacing existing shelter and screening, providing habitats and food sources, and bringing beneficial change within the garden. Where soils are impoverished and barren under ponticum, we have an opportunity to underplant native shrubs with smaller shrubs or sub-shrubs, perennials and spring bulbs, such as Daphne laureola (spurge laurel), Helleborus foetidus (stinking hellebore) and Hyacinthoides non-scripta (bluebell), adding a variety of available fayre for pollinators. We are creating conservation collections, to include UK endemic plants such as Sorbus arranensis and Sorbus pseudofennica, rowan species which exist only on Arran, and the more widely-spread Sorbus torminalis (wild service), still a rarity. Even nonnatives are useful living seed banks, as pressures on land and global warming mean many are rare or now extinct in their native locales.

Clare’s Walk, named after Maggie’s mother, is a narrow, wooded walk with herbaceous borders 30m long either side of its path. Overgrown shrubs require pruning to reveal understorey planting of the bulbs and perennials presently languishing.

Maintenance and minor repair of sculptures is done in-house, but more extensive renovations involve some of the original craftspeople and their younger generations, giving continuity to the garden’s evolution. In the recently reconstructed sculpture representing the sense of Touch, the original creator’s grandchildren are hidden within the fabric of the piece, remade by his sons.

The present owners are committed to preserving, maintaining and improving the garden, and to protecting and increasing

Some large-scale jobs are underway, including felling over 50 black poplar trees which began dropping large branches without warning and were in danger of damaging the white-stemmed birches in the Bone Garden and the nearby Willowtwist and Witches Coven sculptures. This was not on our to-do list, but after some near misses we realised we needed to seize the initiative.

Due to the scale of this work and other impending jobs, we have made the difficult decision to concentrate on those essential works for the coming year and not entertain group visits or host an open weekend in 2025.

These are exciting times, as we make careful assessments of existing qualities and appraise how complementary enhancements can be made, so the garden remains an integrated and cohesive space to be enjoyed for generations to come.

“This is both a daunting and an exciting task.”

Main image: The ponds, and Serpent and Snail mounds. © Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Small image: Detail of the renewed Touch sculpture, showing its tactile planting. The next stage will see softer, trailing plants in the remaining baskets.

The World Garden: born out of sheer adversity

Tom Hart Dyke, horticulturalist, author and plant hunter

The World Garden is a botanical gem set in the beautiful Kent countryside, within the grounds of Lullingstone Castle which dates back to the time of Domesday. I am the garden’s creator and curator, heir to the estate, and the 20th generation of the same family to live at the castle.

I am a plant hunter who was kidnapped in the rainforest wilderness of the Darien Gap on the Panama/Colombia border in 2000, whilst on a mission searching for new species of orchids. To help me endure nine months in captivity, I began sketching out a map of my dream garden. On my release, I returned home and started working within the twoacre Victorian walled garden to transform it into the first World Garden of Plants.

Opening on Easter Saturday in 2005, the garden now celebrates its 20th year. Visitors are greeted by some 7,000 plant species, varieties, cultivars and hybrids. A feast for the senses in all seasons, the garden pays homage to the amazing achievements of the great plant hunters, who risked life and limb in pursuit of the plants we now cherish in our UK gardens; almost 80% of the plants grown are not native to this country. Many years of dedication by myself, our volunteers, family, the local and wider plant community have helped shape the garden, not forgetting my inspirational late maternal Granny who filled me with a passion for plants and adventure from an early age, starting with a packet of carrot seeds and a trowel when I was aged three!

various forms and colours of formidable foliage especially when glisteningly wet. My favourites include Opuntia scheeri (upright prickly pear) from Querétaro state, with oval heavilyspined green pads, and the aesthetically striking blue-green streamline foliage of Nolina nelsonii (blue beargrass tree) from Tamaulipas state.

Now heading across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans we arrive at my favourite continent, Australasia. We are so privileged, through the charity Plant Heritage, to be the guardian of the National Collection of Eucalyptus, representing some 30 taxa. Endowed with a grant from the Royal Horticultural Society and Kent Gardens Trust in 1999, I travelled extensively for four months in Australia’s island state of Tasmania. My mission was to collect seeds of potentially hardy woody plants by travelling to frost-prone, high altitude regions often blessed with inverted tree lines, thus sourcing the most superior, climatically toughest seed genes. From that expedition, in the disproportionally large yet miniature Tasmania I now have Tasmanian snow gum (Eucalyptus coccifera), from the foothills of Mt Ossa, Tasmania’s highest peak.

In fact, explorer’s blood runs in the family: Granny’s uncle, my great-great-uncle Lieutenant Boyd Alexander (1873–1910), was a world-class explorer, ornithologist and British Army officer. For three years (1904–07) he travelled from the Niger to the Nile exploring the Chad Basin. Sadly, on a subsequent return trip to Africa he met a grisly murderous end. Boyd was made a Fellow of the RSGS in Edinburgh on 21 January 1908. The Victorian Moon Gate marks the start of our journey into a botanical treasure trove, laid out as a mini map of the world: countries and continents in their miniature shapes with specimens phytogeographically planted. Native species take pride of place as you enter the garden, with the UK showcasing a 25ft Pinus sylvestris (Scots pine). Nestled underneath is the rhizomatous slender perennial Polygonatum verticillatum (whorled Solomon’s seal). Dogged plant hunter David Douglas (1799–1834), who changed the face of the Victorian landscape with his introductions of magnificent conifers from North America, was inspired by his native Perthshire. His wild adventures, immensely important introductions and stubborn character provided great inspiration to me when growing up. Now let’s sail across the North Atlantic, and disembark on the eastern seaboard of Mexico. Here you are greeted by some seriously prickly friends. These plants are sunbathed in a south facing aspect on raised beds, using car and tractor tyres and builders’ ballast for superlative drainage, mulched with a tonne of house coal which attracts copious amounts of extra heat, contrasting superbly with the

“My inspirational late maternal Granny filled me with a passion for plants and adventure.”

The tour finishes in our warm temperate orchid house, Orchis, where you will see over 100 species of orchid and encounter some more unusual plant curiosities. In a small but perfectly formed space you can see orchids such as Cattleya hybrids, Coelogyne and Stanhopea species. As well as cacti and Tillandsia grown epiphytically on upright felled yew trees, you can observe the pinnacle of plant pain: the rarely cultivated Dendrocnide moroides (Queensland deadly stinger). This devilish member of the nettle family is housed in a bird cage for visitors’ protection! I had first-hand experience of the deadly stinger after brushing past it with my ear on a plant hunting expedition to tropical north-east Australia, and know only too well that the severe debilitating recurring pain does indeed last up to nine months! Lastly, hailing from the cloud forests of South America, the genus Restrepia is well represented: an orchid genus I studied whilst being held as a hostage in Colombia and where the idea of the World Garden was born.

The Moon Gate, the main entrance to the World Garden. © Nicola Stocken | RHS

Aerial view of Lullingstone Castle and the World Garden. © Stephen Sangster

Outlines of Botanical Geography, 1848

Chris Fleet FRSGS, Map Curator, National Library of Scotland

This stunning map by Alexander Keith Johnston (1804–71), with its accompanying mountain profiles and supporting information, was published in Edinburgh in 1848 in Johnston’s Physical Atlas although, as the title makes clear, it derives in part from the work of Heinrich Berghaus, with whom Johnston collaborated. Berghaus’s Physikalischer Atlas of 1845 was itself a monumental achievement, but Johnston’s Physical Atlas is often considered the first comprehensive thematic world atlas, and in its 1848 and 1856 editions it had a great and long-lasting influence on the English-speaking world.

The map and atlas were strongly influenced by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) to whom Johnston dedicated his work. Humboldt was one of the greatest universal naturalists of the nineteenth century. As well as being a plant hunter, his ground-breaking plant geography, first published as Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes (1807), explained the distribution of organic life in relation to climate, latitude and altitude. The mountain cross-sections show the correspondence of plant life with various elevations in mountain ranges at different latitudes. Johnston’s map classified the world into distinct plant regions, colour-coded in a key on the left, which also lists their major explorers and botanists. Although these specific classifications are no longer used, Humboldt’s pioneering efforts in systematically analysing plant distributions and Johnston’s work in depicting their relationship to environmental factors had a lasting impact in the field of phytogeography.

“Johnston’s map classified the world into distinct plant regions.”

AK Johnston, Outlines of Botanical Geography, from The physical atlas: a series of maps and notes illustrating the geographical distribution of natural phenomena (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Son, 1848). Image courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. View online at maps.nls.uk/view/135678718

Cairngorms Rare Plants and Wild Connections

Sam Jones, Senior Ecological Advisor Scotland, Plantlife

Plantlife has been working to protect rare and endangered plants in the Cairngorms for more than ten years. Last summer marked the end of the Cairngorms Rare Plants and Wild Connections project and we are taking the opportunity to celebrate. It was a broad-reaching community-focused project funded by the National Lottery aiming to protect and enhance the unique Cairngorms IPA (Important Plant Area) and surrounding areas. IPAs are internationally recognised as being key sites for plants, supporting rare and precious species, and are the highest priority to protect. The Cairngorms is the UK’s third-largest IPA, supporting a wide range of unique flora on the mountain plateau, in Scots pine woodlands, aspen woodlands, and species-rich upland grasslands.

Due to their rarity and declining populations, the recovery of two pinewood plants, twinflower (Linnaea borealis) and one-flowered wintergreen (Moneses uniflora), provided focus for pinewood conservation work. These species are flagships for the wider pinewood ecosystem, and in protecting them and promoting their preservation, along with amazing woodland restoration work being carried out by many of our partners, we can aid in restoration of fully functional and connected pinewoods. As a result of historical habitat loss, both species now have highly restricted ranges, with all remaining populations small, isolated, and in most cases declining. Alongside advice for land managers, innovation and research of conservation techniques, and connecting practitioners, the key target for both species was translocation (moving individuals from one site to another).

moved to 11 new sites through this project, with the help of a magnificent hard-working group of volunteers, junior rangers, and others.

Alongside this work, four farmers have been supported to trial a new grazing technique for meadows management, the impacts of which are being monitored. The technique, mob grazing, involves partitioning cattle into smaller areas and moving them regularly, aiming to give the sward a rest period where flowers and seed may develop.

Waxcap fungi, rare colourful grassland fungi with a stronghold in Britain, were also a focus of meadows work. Via the Waxcap Watch app, developed for Plantlife Cymru, citizen scientists across the Cairngorms helped identify 18 previously unrecorded high diversity sites. Follow-up events at two sites with land managers, local volunteers, and a mycologist aided both in identification of rare fungi present on site, and in highlighting their importance for protection.

Pinewood fragmentation, due to historical clear felling and a huge increase in deer grazing, has left practically no persistent stands of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) in Scotland. What we have left is mostly plantation or ex-plantation, with unnatural age structures usually lacking old trees, and only tiny fragments of more natural woodland, highly isolated and clinging to inaccessible corners the foresters couldn’t reach. Remaining populations of twinflower and one-flowered wintergreen at these sites, where studied, often number in the single digits. By bringing cuttings or whole plants to sites which are now managed suitably and sustainably, we aided the production of the next generation. An incredibly dedicated group of volunteers cared for hundreds of cuttings in their gardens, allowing us to collect from some of the rarest populations. In total, over 1,000 cuttings/plants were

While surveying mountain tops of the Cairngorms, fungi also proved invaluable. In partnership with the James Hutton Institute, we helped citizen scientists collect soil samples from 55 of 58 Munros in the national park. Over 2,700 different taxa (species or other taxonomic groups) were detected across the survey. Highlights include the discovery of a new species of Squamanita, two records of Arctic fungi not previously known from the UK, and the very rare violet coral (Clavaria zollingeri) from two peaks. This data also contributes to our understanding of the pressures on mountains from climate change and nitrogen deposition. The James Hutton Institute has gone on to survey all remaining Munros in Scotland based on this success.

Plantlife is continuing to work on pinewood and mountaintop plants in the region. Now supported by NatureScot, we remain focused on twinflower and one-flowered wintergreen, while also starting to work on the very rare and isolated tufted saxifrage (Saxifraga cespitosa), and unique aspen moss communities, with aspen bristle moss (Nyholmiella gymnostoma) as a focus. There is interest too in expansion of grazing research and trials, so hopefully in the next year or so we will have more exciting news to share. Thanks, as always, to all our supporters, our partners, and our wonderful volunteers.

“Volunteers cared for hundreds of cuttings in their gardens.”

A view from upper Deeside looking across the habitats of the national park towards Cairn Gorm. © S Jones | Plantlife

The unique and beautiful head of one-flowered wintergreen. © S Jones | Plantlife

Saving rare native plants from extinction

Andrew Shaw BSc (Hons) MSc, Director, The Rare British Plants Nursery

Over a period of 30 years, the Rare British Plants Nursery (www.rarebritishplants.com) has amassed a unique collection of rare native plants. With so many rare species under one roof, our plant nursery has become a renowned and valuable scientific resource. Authors, conservationists, and research scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew are regular visitors. The plants that we hold in cultivation are also enabling species recovery projects that are facilitating the return of rare species back into the wild. Arable weeds are perhaps the most threatened group of plants in Britain. Herbicides, fertilisers and more efficient farming methods eradicated some species within the blink of an eye. Lamb’s succory Arnoseris minima became extinct in 1971; corn cleavers Galium tricornutum is now restricted to one site; darnel Lolium temulentum, a species of grass, is now restricted entirely to the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland; and interrupted brome Bromus interruptus, another annual species of grass, is endemic to England and was last recorded as a wild plant in 1972. We are currently working with Natural England to bring all these species back to sympathetically managed farmland in eastern England.

“Arable weeds are perhaps the most threatened group of plants in Britain.”

surprisingly in a roadside ditch near Ely in Cambridgeshire. These plants appear to have grown from long dormant seed that became exposed when the ditch was dredged. Using material from this last remaining population we are propagating plants that are being introduced to newly created wetlands in eastern England as part of the Great Fen project. The Great Fen project is the sort of restoration project that brings hope for the future. It’s a large-scale landscape restoration project being pioneered by a number of statutory and non-statutory organisations. It’s turning agricultural land back to wetland and will connect two important National Nature Reserves; Woodwalton Fen and Holme Fen. Creating interconnectivity and new fenland habitat will allow rare specialist species to thrive and increase.

Alongside the fen ragwort we are also returning other very rare species to the Great Fen. These include fen violet Viola stagnina, fen woodrush Luzula pallescens, water germander Teucrium scordium, and marsh fleawort Tephroseris palustris that was once common and widespread but became extinct over 120 years ago.

York groundsel Senecio eboracensis evolved in the City of York and was found nowhere else in the world. It grew on disturbed ground next to railway lines, carparks and pavements. Five years ago, there were no living plants left; none in the wild and none in botanical collections. The cheery little yellow flower had been eradicated by a purge on pavement weeds and the redevelopment of waste ground. Fortunately, and shortly before the species became extinct, a forward-thinking botanist had deposited some seeds at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank. Using these seeds, we were able to establish York groundsel in cultivation and this, in turn, allowed us to undertake a recovery project. In summer 2023, York groundsel flowered in the City of York for the first time in over 20 years. In a remarkable turnaround in fortunes for a previously extinct pavement weed, we even exhibited York groundsel at the Chelsea Flower Show where it contributed to a Gold Medal winning show garden.

Fen ragwort Jacobaea paludosa is a tall stately plant with golden yellow flowers. It once occurred throughout the fens of eastern England, but as its wetland habitat was drained to make way for agriculture it was almost completely lost. In fact, it was thought to have become extinct in 1857; that was until 1972 when a small patch was found growing somewhat

Unfortunately, plants are not appreciated or valued in the same way that animals and birds are. Projects promoting the release of beavers Castor fiber, sea eagles Haliaeetus albicilla, ospreys Pandion haliaetus, dormice Muscardinus avellanarius, water voles Arvicola amphibius, pine martens Martes martes and even butterflies all get huge publicity and they attract large amounts of money from funding bodies. None of these species are particularly rare when viewed in a European context. By comparison, beacons hawkweed Hieracium breconicola, which grows in the uplands of mid Wales, receives no publicity and no funding. Prior to our conservation efforts, there was just one beacons hawkweed plant left in the entire world.

With a long-term vision and financial commitment, speciesrich biodiverse habitats can be resurrected. When a habitat is restored, many missing animals and birds will recolonise without direct assistance. For example, iconic rare species like bittern Botaurus stellaris, marsh harrier Circus aeruginosus and water vole have all retuned to the Great Fen naturally. However, isolated and dwindling populations of rare plants are usually unable to regain lost ground. These rare plants are the species that need direct intervention if they are to remain part of our rich biodiversity and be there for future generations to enjoy.

Lamb’s succory. © A G Shaw Fen violet. © A G Shaw Beacons hawkweed. © A G Shaw

The miraculous survival of a tiny plant in Ecuador

John L Clark, Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, Sarasota, Florida, USA

I had the opportunity to be part of a team that discovered Amalophyllon miraculum, a tiny iridescent plant species, in the western Andean slopes of Ecuador. This region, long thought to have lost much of its native biodiversity due to deforestation, surprised us with a new chapter in its story.

The two-inch-high plant, with iridescent leaves and white ephemeral flowers, was found in an area once believed to be a barren agricultural landscape.

Our research team, consisting of Ecuadorian and international scientists, had been conducting ongoing expeditions in the Centinela region. Centinela is famous for being the site where many plants were described during the 1970s and 1980s, but rapid deforestation had led many scientists to believe that much of its native plant life had disappeared. Alwyn Gentry and Calaway Dodson’s 1993 publication, Biological extinction in western Ecuador, famously documented the loss of up to 97% of the western Ecuadorian lowland rainforest and the massive extinction of plant species due to deforestation. EO Wilson referred to this phenomenon as ‘Centinelan extinction’, where species went extinct as their habitats were destroyed.

waterfalls and steep slopes. Without their commitment, the survival of these fragments would not have been possible. Ongoing conservation efforts by organisations like Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco and the Jardín Botánico Padre Julio Marrero of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador are essential to protecting these areas. I am especially proud to work alongside farmers and conservation groups who have made these remarkable stories of survival possible.

Looking back on the discovery of Amalophyllon miraculum, I reflect on how far we’ve come in understanding the resilience of the natural world. It gives me hope for the future of conservation in regions like Centinela. While human activity has altered much of the landscape, the surviving fragments of intact rainforest provide hope and inspiration. These ecosystems demonstrate the importance of preserving even the smallest remnants so that biodiversity can flourish.

“Even places thought to be lost forever can still harbour hidden biodiversity treasures.”

At first, it seemed unthinkable that fragments of intact rainforest could still be hiding in Centinela. However, in 2021, a team of scientists made a discovery that challenged this belief. Just 20 miles from the city of Santo Domingo, one of Ecuador’s major urban centres, we rediscovered small, isolated forest fragments nestled among agricultural fields. Despite their remoteness, these patches were harbouring native vegetation. I arrived in 2022, after the initial expedition, and found Amalophyllon miraculum, a plant so small and elusive that it had escaped detection for years. Its iridescent foliage and delicate flowers were a rare treasure in a region once written off as deforested and devoid of native biodiversity.

The significance of this discovery goes beyond the plant’s beauty. Amalophyllon miraculum represents a vital lesson in the resilience of nature. Named after the miraculous circumstances of its rediscovery, the plant proves that hope remains for this once-thought-to-be-deforested region. The name miraculum reflects the amazement we felt upon finding such a rare species in an area transformed by deforestation. It’s a reminder that even places thought to be lost forever can still harbour hidden biodiversity treasures.

The tiny forest fragments where we found this plant are vital refuges for a range of other plant and animal species, some of which are critically endangered. These ‘islands’ of biodiversity persist thanks to local landowners, who have worked tirelessly to conserve patches of forest around

In our publication Amalophyllon miraculum (Gesneriaceae), we documented the details of this new species. It’s a discovery that challenges us to think differently about conservation in landscapes once thought to be lost. It affirms that biodiversity can endure, even in unexpected places.

The discovery of Amalophyllon miraculum and other rediscovered species in Centinela is a testament to nature’s resilience. It inspires us to keep seeking opportunities to protect these disappearing ecosystems and to celebrate the miracles that still exist in our world.

FURTHER READING & VIEWING

JL Clark, A Fernández, JN Zapata, C Restrepo-Villarroel, DM White, N Pitman (2024) Amalophyllon miraculum (Gesneriaceae), an exceptionally small lithophilous new species from the western Andean slopes of Ecuador (PhytoKeys, phytokeys.pensoft.net)

Viva Centinela! website (sites.google.com/view/vivacentinela/ home)

Video of initial discovery (www.instagram.com/p/ Cf8Da5RMpyI)

Pando: documenting an ancient lifeform

Lance Oditt, Founder and Executive Director, Friends of Pando

Pando is the world’s largest tree of any kind. Located in the Fishlake National Forest in south-central Utah, the Pando Tree is simultaneously the largest tree by weight (5.98 million kilogrammes), the largest tree by landmass (43.2 hectares) and the largest aspen tree, while also being the oldest tree in the Americas – at least 9,000 years old and perhaps as much as 16,000 years old according to the best testing methods we have today. Discovered in 1976 by Burton Barnes, the tree features 47,000 genetically identical trunks interconnected via a root system that could span 19,312km if laid end-toend and which coordinates energy production, defence and regeneration as a single organism; a forest of one tree. Work to protect, monitor and care for this natural wonder got underway in 1987. Various groups have worked to restore the tree, as it was the subject of severe degradation due to human development efforts previous to its discovery. Founded in 2019, Friends of Pando is dedicated and working to care for the tree alongside Pando’s federal stewards, Fishlake National Forest. We also work with a broad coalition of organisations at the state and community level to achieve our mission. In 2022 Friends of Pando began work, and in 2023 we launched the Pando Living Map Project to document this previously undocumented wonder and to record efforts to protect it to ensure it can be enjoyed for generations to come. Making one who moves over the land, visible Born of a single seed the size of a grain of rice, Pando, whose name means ‘I spread’, has been moving over its homeland, amoeba-like for millennia. Each trunk’s root serves as a node where the fast-growing tree can spread outward again. That process of self-propagation is driven by the balance of hormones between the root and the sky. Auxin leads upward growth and, as it does, suppresses cytokinins, the regenerative hormone. Each individual tree is a microcosm of the larger system; it will rise and gather energy which will be shared with the larger whole. When a trunk dies, cytokinins will again dominate the hormone balance and spur new growth from the root. It is in this way that Pando moves; able to grow a metre a year upward and connected to a network life one kilometre wide, growth can appear within the landmass, or expand on the boundaries. That effort is simultaneously chemical, physical and mathematical. Regeneration is driven by an ancient hormone cycle. What grows above ground, stabilises and balances energy gathering potential across the tree. Pando’s movement over the land develops in response to hormone balances and welcomes disturbances and adversity; a fire, drought or wind storm may decimate numbers above ground, while below ground, the regenerative action is amplified. No surprise then, when work got underway to document the tree, there were three different physical maps used to describe the tree, each based on a working concept of how the tree moves over time:

a genetic map based on 184 plots where tree tissues were gathered; a developmental map is used by land managers in work to protect and plan for work on the tree; a field map, arguably a hybrid of the two. It is through the application of all three maps and new ones that we can protect, monitor, and restore the tree. The Pando Living Map project works to tell the story of caring for an ancient wonder who has borne witness to five epochs of human culture.

A living map

Dating back to the late 1980s, land managers, ecologists and independent scientists have defined models and methods to care for Pando. While in many ways we can care for Pando quite like we would a perennial crop, given proper investments and fieldwork, that effort requires yearly investments. Previous to Friends of Pando, work on Pando was developed and undertaken in a stop-and-start fashion, a process that had grown rife with recriminations as philosophies of the hour exhausted goodwill while budgets waxed and waned.

Thanks to collaboration between Pando’s federal land stewards, Snow College (Richfield), our technology partners and volunteers across the world, we can begin to tell a new story about work to care for Pando. Version 2 of the Pando Living Map project not only provides physical maps, but allows users to examine and compare data we collect in the effort to protect and care for the tree and understand the year-over-year investments and challenges. As we move toward a third version, there are plans to marry 2D physical maps, LiDar scans with 360-degree photography of site across the tree.

In all, a full picture of a wonder we are still coming to know with value for laymen, land managers and researchers alike. To meet Pando and explore its expanse in maps and 360-degree imagery, we welcome you to visit www. friendsofpando.org

“A forest of one tree.”

Agrivoltaics policy

Byron Kominek, Owner and Manager, Jack’s Solar Garden, and Executive Director, Colorado Agrivoltaic Learning Center

‘Solar arrays remove prime farmland from agricultural production’ is a common refrain that rural communities use to deter solar developments. And yes, it can be true. Traditional low-to-the-ground solar arrays on recently graded soils with electrical wires poorly secured against the infrastructure make it extremely difficult to farm once built. But solar arrays don’t have to be built like this; we can do things differently.

Agrivoltaics, being the coupling of solar array infrastructure with agricultural activities, should guide solar array development. Three key solar array design and construction principles can change a traditional solar array into one where agricultural activities can thrive. They are: improve land accessibility; prioritise safe wire management techniques; and don’t destroy the land during construction.

Accessibility refers to the ability of vehicles, animals, tractors and people to move within a solar array. If solar panels are short to the ground, it becomes difficult for anything to move underneath or around them to use the shade on hot days. If there is a driveshaft running perpendicular to the rows of solar panels, turning the site into a checkerboard, movements for harvesting, rotational grazing, mowing, pushing a wheelbarrow and spreading compost are all obstructed. Various solar array products are available that support solar array accessibility. Even better products can be developed that aid agrivoltaic developments.

Wire management is critical to safe agricultural operations within a solar array. Any interaction between a wire and animals, people, machinery or tools is a dangerous interaction to have. Solar companies must prioritise working with electricians to keep wires high and tight, flush against infrastructure to remove gaps where hooves or implements could go, and in harder conduit where wires run from up high into the ground. These techniques keep farmers, ranchers and electrical equipment safe from unnecessary harm.

Not destroying land during construction is crucial for long-term agricultural operations. Soil disturbance and compaction must be avoided as much as possible. This entails trenching only as wide as wire burial needs, not grading the ground, and reducing vehicle movements over any given spot on a field to diminish compaction. The more brittle your climate (ie, less rainfall and a short growing season) the more important it is to follow these principles, as nature does not recover quickly in those environments.

To ensure these practices are followed, both new regulations and updated evaluation criteria for selecting solar projects are needed. First on regulations. Communities should require solar array construction on farmland to follow the above agrivoltaic design and building guidance. This will keep solar array lands productive beyond just electricity. Community guidance documents like comprehensive development plans or zoning codes should require agrivoltaic building codes on farmland. Without proper regulations, businesses and individuals will do the bare minimum that is required when it’s not in their financial interest. Solar development is no different.

At a state, provincial or national level, the most useful support for agrivoltaics is not pouring financial incentives on companies or organisations in hopes they build agrivoltaic systems. Instead, look to where the decisions are made about what company is selected to build a solar array for a community, government entity or utility. The selection/ evaluation criteria used to determine which company wins a bid to build a solar array is an inflection point. Either the criteria support traditional energy sector judgments that revolve solely around finances, or new criteria can be added into the mix such as a substantive value for land stewardship. Many American utilities and local governments already have added in evaluation criteria that promote cheaper electricity for low-income households. It’s simply important to know what evaluation criteria are used, as they dictate what project will be built.

Let’s ask of our governments and utilities to add land stewardship to solar array development evaluation criteria. Out of 100 points, let’s give 30 points on how a solar array will be designed and built for agrivoltaic purposes and longterm agricultural utilisation. This still leaves 70 points for traditional criteria that all solar companies are accustomed to. With this change, we add in criteria that help us better differentiate between companies, beyond price, while giving our farmland a much better chance at being utilised for decades to come.

In all cases, community involvement is needed upfront to share these ideas broadly. Policymakers need to hear that communities want to see farmland remain active within solar arrays. Without policymakers onboard, widespread adoption of agrivoltaics will be unattainable. So, please, talk with all your friends about agrivoltaics.

“Change a traditional solar array into one where agricultural activities can thrive.”

Raspberries growing at Jack’s Solar Garden

Cows can move around safely in Jack’s Solar Garden.

Jack’s Solar Garden

Byron Kominek, Owner and Manager, Jack’s Solar Garden, and Executive Director, Colorado Agrivoltaic Learning Center

Grandpa Jack bought my family’s farm in Boulder County, Colorado in 1972. This little 24-acre farm, on which I now live, was his retirement farm. My grandmother Grace and he managed the land until 1980 when Jack died. Our farm then transitioned through different land tenants before ending up with a couple from Iowa (Barb and Harold) who hayed our fields for some 20 years. I appear in this story in 2016 when I moved here after a life overseas, wanting to connect to my family’s land.

In 2017, Barb and Harold retired. I had learned a little from them about the haying industry and how little it paid. We didn’t even make enough money selling hay to pay all the farm’s bills, let alone go to the grocery store with the money. So what was the point? I wanted a new path for our farm, though I had no agricultural skills. Being more of a city kid, I had a steep learning curve ahead of me.

I investigated various agricultural businesses, from free-range chickens to gourmet mushroom cultivation to growing Christmas trees. None were practical for my situation. I settled on building a solar array to generate renewable energy and passive income. It was a regulatory and financial challenge we slowly figured out, but more perilous were the emotional conversations I had with my mother who owned the farm. How could I convert farmland into an ugly solar array that would be fenced off so she could no longer walk on her father’s land? Fair points Mom, but it didn’t have to be that way.

In 2020, after years of planning and negotiating, my family built Jack’s Solar Garden, a 1.2MW single-axis tracking solar array covering about five acres of land. There was no fence around it so we could access the land easily. We elevated the panels and connected the electrical wires in a way to enable people, machines and animals to safely move within the solar array. We allowed for commercial agricultural production under our solar panels while academic researchers studied how crops grew. This coupling of solar array infrastructure with agricultural activities is agrivoltaics. As an aside, it only took me 2017–19 to convince my mother we should do this. Now she loves it.

usage of our land, which is important in land constricted communities. Secondly, as the solar industry likes, agrivoltaics is more favourably looked upon by communities and local governments than traditional solar developments, which can expedite the permitting process or, even better, approve a project that would otherwise have been rejected. The following benefits of agrivoltaics are lesser known, but are important nonetheless.

The installation of solar panels mitigates the impacts of climate change as less fossil fuel is burned. I see agrivoltaics as a climate adaptation technique helping prepare communities for the inevitable changing of our climate. Single-axis tracking solar arrays cycle sun and shade over the ground so nowhere is in full sun or full shade. This reduces the overall thermal stresses on crops and livestock, especially in hot and dry environments. Given global temperatures are predicted to increase in the coming years, more accessible shade for crops, livestock and people is a societal adaptation that will eventually become a premium for agricultural endeavours.

“Many leafy greens grow exceedingly well in our solar array.”

“Byron, crops don’t grow in the shade!” Au contraire mon ami, have you walked through a forest and seen plants grow in the partial shade of the trees? Plants can still grow using reflected light, not necessarily being their preferred way to grow, but a preferred outcome to wilting under an intense sun. Cool season crops and grasses prefer more temperate temperatures, and stop photosynthesis when temperatures rise beyond their limit. We find many leafy greens (eg, lettuce, celery, arugula, spinach, etc) grow exceedingly well in our solar array where they only get 50–70% of daily sunlight. Other crops do well too, depending on their varietal. Our farming partner has found they can grow all kinds of market garden veggies like potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, onions, beets, radishes, bok choy, melons and more in these lower-light conditions, some better than others. As Colorado is far more water limited than it is light limited, shade keeps moisture in the ground longer for plants to access while restricting the availability of our abundant sunlight.

Four seasons later, we know agrivoltaics to be beneficial in many ways. The most obvious is that it enables the dual

To learn more about the benefits of agrivoltaics, visit www. coagrivoltaic.org, then come visit us!

Potatoes growing at Jack’s Solar Garden.

Lettuce and other leafy greens grow well in the protection of the solar array.

Las Dueñas, Seville: the combination of the deep ochre, the ornate plasterwork, the green of the hedges and the vertical lines of columns and palm trees makes the entrance patio breathtakingly rich.

© Derry Moore

Lur Garden, San Sebastián, Spain

Monty Don, garden writer and broadcaster

Sooner or later, if you visit enough gardens, you see what a certain group of plants are really like, what they can aspire to be and attain, given the right conditions. In that respect, the Lur Garden is the epicentre of hydrangea heaven. The soil is very sandy and stony so drains well. If they occasionally get a frost it is only a degree or so; they have at least a metre of rain and it is warm and very humid in summer. This, exactly this, is what hydrangeas like best.

What I liked best in this garden that is so packed with plants and so exuberant in style and sustained energy was the Moon Garden. Iñigo bought a mass of huge flat stones on a whim and he said that they lay unused for a few years because although he liked them, he didn’t know what to do with them. Then he got a digger in and, in a morning, laid them out, without a plan, just directing stone after stone as the sequence presented itself to his eye. The result is a masterpiece. These great slabs are laid on raised soil berms like sections of a giant path or geological sandstone pavement, with grikes and clints filled with spilling white and silver flowers and grasses – pennisetum, Miscanthus sinensis, gaura, Ammi visnaga, candytufts and everywhere white erigeron. Topiarised yew eggs add structure to the borders and, as with the whole garden, everywhere you look there is the rising backdrop of trees from the valley sides.

It is a spectacular place, with a lot of everything, overflowing with plants and concepts and its own kinetic energy. It is almost overwhelming, almost too much, but actually a horticultural feast, and you leave full to the brim but delighted and privileged to have taken part in this gardening grande bouffe

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Lur Garden, San Sebastián: the garden is bounded by a stream along one side and within the cool humidity of its banks are stone cushions topped with moss and scores of Dicksonia tree ferns. © Derry Moore

Creating the world’s largest climate-positive artwork

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Studio

In 2020, London-based artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg was commissioned to make a sculpture for the Eden Project in Cornwall, to bring attention to the importance of pollinating insects, and the massive decline in their populations. Ginsberg responded with a provocation that would lead to the development of the world’s largest climate-positive artwork: what might a sculpture look like if it was not about pollinators, but for pollinators?

Pollinator Pathmaker is a living artwork for pollinators, planted and cared for by humans. In what has become a unique experiment in interspecies design, Ginsberg worked with horticulturalists, pollinator experts and a computer scientist to invent an algorithmic tool that designs planting for pollinators’ tastes, not human taste. Users simply enter their garden’s region, soil type, pH, light and exposure, and the algorithm computes a one-off planting design, ready to be planted as an edition of the artwork. Every artwork generated is different, but each is optimised to support the greatest diversity of pollinator species. By creating for other species, Ginsberg wanted to make art a platform for empathy and agency to care for our shared natural world.

random explorations of beetles. Following the success of the first two public editions, the artwork received its first international commission in 2023 from the Berlin-based LAS Art Foundation, seeing volunteers bed more than 7,000 plants into the previously bare forecourt in front of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. Now, the entrance to the museum is full of bees, butterflies, moths, beetles and more, with rare species sighted as they find a new food source joining the sparse network of green spaces in the city’s centre. Alongside the growing roster of large public editions, the key to Pollinator Pathmaker’s power as a climatepositive artwork is the DIY Edition campaign. Ginsberg has made the algorithmic tool available for free on the website pollinator.art, complete with step-by-step instructions on how to plant a DIY Edition at home, at school or in community spaces. With plant lists covering much of Europe, and more regions in development, the public is invited to plant and care for their own living artworks.

“‘If pollinators designed gardens, what would humans see?’”

The first public edition of Pollinator Pathmaker opened at the Eden Project in 2022; a 55m-long permanent installation in the Outdoor Gardens overlooking the famous biomes. Later the same year, the second edition was planted at the North Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, London, commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries. Featuring over 500m2 of perennial planting across 11 meandering beds, as with all Pollinator Pathmaker editions it was calculated to bloom throughout the year, supporting different insect species as they emerge and arranged to suit different foraging behaviours, from the memorised traplines of bees to the

Pollinator Pathmaker continues to expand in new directions. Ginsberg has partnered with the University of Exeter and the University of Edinburgh in an exciting multi-disciplinary research project funded by UK Research and Innovation. In February 2025, the village of Constantine in Cornwall became a testbed for Pollinator Pathmaker at the landscape scale, as 17 local gardens were replanted as artworks. Over the next 18 months, network ecologists, social scientists and a philosopher of science will explore not only how Pollinator Pathmaker can be used in conservation efforts as they track insects’ movements across the village’s gardens, but just as importantly, the artwork’s power to give agency to the public to remake the world for other species.

“If pollinators designed gardens, what would humans see?” was the artist’s starting point for Pollinator Pathmaker, as she asked how art can enable us to experience the world from the perspective of other species. Now it’s your turn to join in, plant art and see your garden as a living artwork.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a multidisciplinary artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, conservation and evolution, Ginsberg explores the human impulse to ‘better’ the world, challenging the contemporary fixation on innovation over conservation that ignores the environmental crisis. Her work is in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and ZKM Karlsruhe. In 2023, she won the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS Grand Prize for Artistic Exploration for her artwork Pollinator Pathmaker.

Pollinator Pathmaker LAS Edition in the forecourt of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, June 2023. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. © Sabine Bungert

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Pollinator Pathmaker in Pollinator Vision, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Ltd

Saving our treasures under glass

Suzie Huggins, Communications Manager – Edinburgh Biomes, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

At over eight metres tall and several tonnes in weight, Trachycarpus princeps (stone gate palm) isn’t the daintiest of botanical specimens. Nonetheless, the palm, a rarity in cultivation and therefore one of the most important trees at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, has become a symbol of resilience. This is the largest plant to be successfully moved during preparations for the Garden’s landmark Edinburgh Biomes project.

The project, perhaps the most visionary in the Botanics’ 355-year history, will see the restoration or replacement of its 27 public and research glasshouses, the creation of a new energy centre that will significantly reduce the Garden’s carbon emissions, and a new plant health hub that will provide a safe and biosecure propagation environment. The first stage in the ambitious development project is the restoration of the magnificent Palm Houses. Standing 22 metres high, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s Temperate Palm House is one of the key landmarks in the capital, visible from Edinburgh Castle. Yet this city icon, and its adjoining Tropical Palm House, are almost 200 years old, and centuries of Scottish winters have taken their toll.

Located at the heart of the Garden, the two A-listed structures are outstanding examples of late Georgian and Victorian engineering and part of Scotland’s architectural heritage. However, their true value comes with the role they play in providing a safe refuge for many of the fascinating plants that are part of the Botanics’ Living Collection.

buildings in the face of climate change and increasingly intense rainfall.

Replacing almost 2,000 square metres of glass has also required skill and creativity. The old glass was prone to break during storms, forcing the buildings’ closure and posing a danger to 400 species of plants. Now, the two new types of glass being installed (laminated panes in the roofs and toughened glass in the windows) are expected to be more resilient and less likely to shatter in the face of weather.

Creating panes of glass that exactly fit the curved nature of the Palm Houses’ domes has also been testing, and a unique numbered template for each of the 5,750 panes of glass had to be created from plywood.

This spring, the final repairs will be made before the construction element ends and the historic buildings are returned to the care of the Botanics. As that story ends, another begins, as the next chapter in the restoration of the Palm Houses – the landscaping, engaging interpretation, and replanting of the precious Living Collection before visitors return – is written.

“A unique numbered template for each of the 5,750 panes of glass had to be created from plywood.”

As work to restore the Palm Houses to their former glory progresses, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh looks forward to them once again providing a haven for hundreds of plants, welcoming visitors to an exciting new experience and protecting biodiversity for future generations. Visit rbge.org.uk/palmhouses to learn more about the restoration of the Palm Houses.

The programme to restore the Palm Houses began in 2021 with the removal of 800 plants for safekeeping, including the Trachycarpus princeps, believed to be the tallest in cultivation outside of China, and the Wollemia nobilis (Wollemi pine), ranked as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In fact, around 6% of the plants removed from the Palm Houses appear on the IUCN list of vulnerable, threatened and endangered species. Each tree was dug out carefully by hand, then raised from the ground using a system of ropes and A-frames. Laid horizontally, they were gently transported to the Garden’s Temperate Lands Glasshouse, where they remain in specially designed pots while the Palm Houses are being renovated. The renovation works proper began in September that year, with the creation of a skeleton of scaffolding inside and outside the buildings – so intricate it took six months to build – before the Palm Houses disappeared under layers of protective wrap. Then, the challenge of restoring six hundred square metres of ironwork began.

At almost seven metres high, the 19 giant arched windows which grace the front and sides of the Temperate Palm House are among its most memorable features, and the mission facing the team was to restore, rather than replace, the original ironwork. With each window consisting of three parts, each with varying levels of corrosion, this proved to be quite a challenge but, just before Christmas 2024, the final restored arched window was successfully reinstalled. Other more subtle modifications, such as the creation of wider gutters and downpipes, will help to better protect the

The Victorian Temperate Palm House at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Before restoration work can begin, the team must first remove large specimens, including the Trachycarpus princeps palm.

The seed library: a local response to global challenges

Margaret Lear, Perthshire Seed Library

We all remember the arrival of Covid-19 in 2020: the sudden reluctance to socialise, the appearance of face masks, the inevitable lockdown on 22nd March. Then, as an uneasy spring developed into a beautiful warm summer, we remember the challenges of getting food, queues at the supermarkets, gaps on the shelves, enterprising small grocers providing home deliveries. With time available and obliging weather, those lucky enough to have gardens rushed to ‘grow their own’. Do we also remember when, flocking to buy seed, we found there was little to be had?

In 2021, 60% of the global seed trade came from just four multinational companies. These aren’t the cheery wee gardeners depicted on seed packets. They are big businesses with interests in petrochemical fertilisers, pesticides and genetic engineering. GM and F1 hybrid seeds are ‘patented’ by large companies, meaning they own them. Only they can sell them. It’s illegal (and unwise) to save these seeds. Now the UK government, via DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), is proposing the deregulation of genetically modified organisms, specifically the innocuous-sounding ‘gene-edited’ kinds. Environmentally, it’s a leap in the dark; crucially it ties independent hands behind backs, putting even more power over seed into those corporations willing and financially able to implement the science. While DEFRA’S proposals under devolution do not apply to Scotland, try telling that to a cloud of pollen in Berwick-upon-Tweed! Moreover, the Scottish government, under the Internal Market Act, will not be able to prevent the sale of GM products from England.

keep strains pure. Tomatoes and cucurbits are easy once you understand ripeness and techniques for seed cleaning and fermentation. But most of us lack gardens large enough for the populations of 25–100 brassicas needed for outbreeding diversity, which must occupy space for two years before flowering and setting seed. Nor is it straightforward when courgettes and pumpkins must be hand pollinated to avoid crossing, or carrot crops protected to keep out wild carrot pollen. So, in 2024, we acquired a plot at Blackhaugh Community Farm (a chemical-free regenerative farm supporting various enterprises) in Perth and, with local funding, have developed it into a site where these difficult seed crops can be grown.

“We run free workshops on sowing, growing, composting, seed harvesting and seed saving.”

To our ancestors, this would have been incomprehensible and outrageous. Who does seed belong to? Those who harvest and sow it have always claimed a right to use, save and pass it on, down the generations. This is seed sovereignty. Without it, food security is fragile.

Back in Scotland in early 2020, Perthshire Organic Gardeners was finalising a one-day climate action event called Our Food, Our Land. Everything was booked for 21st March. Then came Covid-19. The event went on Zoom, with a busy string of discussion groups convening online over the coming months. We focused on climate actions around food and growing. By the final meeting, we had resolved to form Perthshire Seed Library.

Supported by Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty programme, four years later Perthshire Seed Library operates in partnership with Perthshire libraries, with over 230 members throughout the county. Members receive 20 or more packets of seed a year, and we run free workshops on sowing, growing, composting, seed harvesting and seed saving. The biannual inventory of mainly self-saved seed is immense. Packets can be collected from any local or mobile library. Members deposit seed at the same library. It is sent to Perth’s central library and stored, then sorted and weighed into seed envelopes at sociable pre-Christmas packing sessions.

Some seeds are easy to save. Beans and peas are largely self-pollinating and do not require isolation structures to

Our emphasis is very much on local seed for local people. By growing seed that has been selected and thrives in their area, growers have more success than with seed imported from southern Europe. Seed is remarkably adaptable: in our inventory we have an Italian asparagus selected in Highland Perthshire over 15 years for precocious cropping, and a Scotlandacclimatised Greek beef tomato! However, we anticipate rapid climate insecurity and extreme weather. Do we focus on saving seed of known ‘heritage’ varieties (such as onion ‘Ailsa Craig’ or tomato ‘Scotland’s Yellow’), discarding all specimens atypical of the variety? Or should we allow cross-pollination between strains to produce ‘landrace’ varieties, varying widely as individuals but containing all the genes for adaptation to extreme conditions and challenges? The latter may lend a greater measure of local resilience in food growing. It’s probably why Ian’s asparagus and Gkousiari tomatoes, showing landrace-type variation, succeed in Perthshire.

Today, Perthshire Seed Library can extend our seed-cropping activities in collaboration with other growers and community groups, so perhaps we can use both approaches, and experiment. Through Gaia’s Community Seed Forum, we can collaborate with the ever-increasing number of groups throughout the UK, the latest in Dundee. Ours isn’t the only model for running a seed library, but we all share the same aims: greater control of our food supply through saving seed, reskilling growers, and consuming more wisely.

Bean seeds.

Gkousiari tomatoes.

Safeguarding crop diversity for a resilient and food-secure future

Dr Kent Nnadozie, Executive Secretary, International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation

In the face of mounting global challenges of biodiversity loss, climate change, and food insecurity, the role of plants in securing our future has never been more critical. Plants not only sustain life but also embody the cultural heritage and economic development of humanity, and ecosystem resilience. Yet, this invaluable resource is under threat on a range of fronts and calls for concerted and collective global efforts to address. These efforts will include such multistakeholder policy platforms and legal instruments as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (the Plant Treaty).

Why crop diversity matters

The diversity of crop species and varieties is the foundation of global agriculture and food security. Each unique variety represents a reservoir of traits (such as resistance to pests, tolerance to drought or flooding, and nutritional benefits) that farmers and breeders have relied on for generations. However, agricultural biodiversity is under severe threat. While exact figures can vary, estimates suggest that much of the genetic diversity in the wild and in farmers’ fields has been replaced or abandoned in the last century.

Modern farming practices, which emphasise high-yielding, genetically uniform crops, have contributed to a significant narrowing of the genetic base. This trend, known as genetic erosion, has made food systems more vulnerable to crises. When uniform crops dominate landscapes, they are more susceptible to pests, diseases, and environmental shocks, as seen in historical examples like the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, where reliance on a few susceptible varieties led to catastrophic crop failures. The stakes are even higher today.

develop crop varieties resilient to drought, heat, pests, and diseases, adaptations that are crucial as climate change alters agricultural landscapes.

The MLS also includes provisions to ensure that benefits derived from the use of these genetic resources, whether in the form of new crop varieties, research advancements, or royalties, are shared equitably with farmers and communities who have contributed to conserving and developing them. This equitable sharing of benefits is essential to fostering trust and collaboration among nations and ensuring that those at the forefront of biodiversity conservation (often smallholder farmers) are not left behind.

By facilitating the exchange of genetic materials and knowledge, the Treaty empowers countries to respond to emerging crises. For example, through the Treaty, researchers in drought-prone regions have accessed heat-resistant crop varieties, enabling farmers to sustain production despite harsher conditions. Moreover, the Treaty promotes collaboration among nations, reinforcing the principle that no country alone can secure its agricultural future.

Looking ahead

“Smallholder farmers are the custodians of agricultural diversity.”

The upcoming Eleventh Session of the Treaty’s Governing Body, set to take place in Lima, Peru, in November 2025, represents a pivotal moment. Hosted jointly by Peru and Switzerland, this session will gather policymakers, scientists, farmers, and civil society organisations to strengthen the Treaty’s role in addressing global food system challenges.

Beyond agriculture, crop diversity plays a role in maintaining ecosystem health. Many traditional varieties are interwoven with local ecosystems and cultural practices, fostering soil fertility, supporting pollinators, and sustaining livelihoods. This interconnectedness underscores why conserving crop diversity is not just a technical challenge but also an existential imperative to protect the biological and cultural heritage of humanity.

As climate change intensifies, crops must adapt to shifting growing conditions, whether it’s increasing heat, erratic rainfall, or salinized soils. Crop diversity is humanity’s toolbox for this adaptation. The Plant Treaty recognises the immense value of crop diversity, seeking to safeguard it through global collaboration. By linking conservation with sustainable use and equitable benefit-sharing, the Treaty ensures that these vital resources remain available, not just for today’s challenges but also for the unknown future crises.

A shared solution

At the heart of the Treaty is its Multilateral System of Access and Benefit-Sharing (MLS). This unique mechanism facilitates access to a global pool of plant genetic materials of important crops such as rice, wheat, and maize. Scientists, farmers, and breeders worldwide rely on these resources to

Among the key priorities will be scaling up funding for conservation initiatives, enhancing the MLS’s reach and impact, and aligning the Treaty’s work with international frameworks such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Discussions will also focus on empowering smallholder farmers and indigenous communities, who play a critical role in maintaining agricultural biodiversity.

A call to action

The work of the Plant Treaty is as much about people as it is about plants. Smallholder farmers, especially women, are the custodians of agricultural diversity. Their knowledge, often passed down through generations, is vital for adapting crops to ever-changing environments. Recognising and protecting their rights is integral to the Treaty’s mission.

As we confront an uncertain future, the importance of conserving and using plant genetic resources cannot be overstated. They are the raw materials for innovation, the foundation for resilient food systems, and a safeguard against hunger in a warming world.

Through collaboration and shared responsibility, the Plant Treaty embodies the belief that biodiversity is a global common good, one that demands our collective care. The road ahead is challenging, but with initiatives like the Plant Treaty, we can ensure that the seeds of today become the harvest of tomorrow – a future where diversity flourishes, ecosystems are robust, and no one goes hungry.

Papua New Guinea.

Community Gardens Beyond Communities

Jenny Glen, Lecturer and Practice Learner Convenor, University of Dundee

During recent decades, community gardens have rapidly spread in the Global North, and are often seen as possible solutions to a range of social ills. By creating a community garden, people can increase local pride and a sense of achievement, and provide a safe open space in which they can garden and participate in informal learning opportunities. Many of the activities offered in community gardens are aimed at increasing health and well-being, and learning about the environment.

Community gardens have been credited with building community cohesion and social capital, and supporting individuals’ health and well-being, by providing space for important work that addresses ‘social need’ and that advances ‘community empowerment’. The benefits of the collective nature of community gardens are well documented, and are often only marginally related to gardening, with the emphasis on building a sense of ‘community’.

their communities to address climate change and related challenges faced by urban centres. The programme was driven by their experiences and voices, and enabled the sharing of wider practice knowledge, academic research and international examples of good practice.

We brought diverse voices together and discussed crosscutting issues that impact on, and are being impacted by, environmental changes. We hope that we have mobilised participants to think beyond their roles in ‘mental well-being’ and ‘community cohesion’. Although these are relevant, the programme demonstrated that community gardens have an unlocked potential that is being already explored elsewhere. International experiences provided meaningful insights that will help reshape the way community gardens operate and are considered by policy makers and social activists.

“The programme demonstrated what can be achieved by community activists.”

The growth in community gardens is also linked to politics of food, in terms of what we eat and how it is grown; they are seen as places that can benefit individuals and the community simultaneously. Community gardens can also be seen as a reaction to a growing demand by people reconnecting with the food on their table rather than being part of the globalised industrialised food economy which separates people from local food sources.

The Community Gardens Beyond Communities programme (www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/Programmes/UNGlobalGoals/ CommunityGardens.aspx) focused on the role of local community activism in addressing climate change and related challenges faced by urban centres, through the creation and development of community gardens and the potential for these initiatives to create synergies for wider environmental change beyond local communities.

The programme involved the collaboration of community activists and academic partners from Scotland, Mexico, Brazil, Rwanda, Uganda, Nepal and Kenya. The key aim was to share good practice that can mobilise local communities to be more active to address environmental challenges, such as reuse of organic waste, production of food, and strengthened links with wider urban issues that impact on the most vulnerable groups.

The main beneficiaries of the programme were the community activists and participants who are working in

Projects involved reclaimed urban spaces as collective means of production, questioned land distribution/ policy, raised awareness of the distribution of resources, and fought for the recognition of the importance of green areas in urban spaces.

The projects focused on behaviour and attitudinal changes, and promoted a human rights perspective, with a focus on ‘community’ in community gardens, community gardens’ links to building capacity, and the importance of bringing diverse communities together, including different generations, to share knowledge and learn from each other. The programme demonstrated what can be achieved by community activists, and their role in encouraging and enabling others to change behaviours and attitudes at a local level to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Community garden and food growing experiences were a trigger for dialogue to stimulate critical awareness and the political areas of opportunity that can influence behaviour change.

The main themes across the projects involved were:

• community gardens and community food growing as spaces of dialogue, where sharing knowledge, expertise and experiences can bring people together to enable an intersectional approach on environmental issues;

• the importance of drawing on local resources, including generational skills, and utilising and sharing knowledge that was already in the community but might have been forgotten;

• the sharing and development of permaculture techniques suited to the local environment with a ‘no waste’ ethos;

• encouraging and enabling people to get involved in local events linked to community mobilisation, and wider community action linked to land ownership, climate change and urbanisation;

• the importance of working with children to connect to nature; children were seen as the gateway to working with families and the wider community;

• the role of women in local communities, and the project’s role in empowering women in the community and enabling economic, political and social independence;

• building community cohesion and well-being, and the role of community gardens and food growing in combating isolation and food and financial poverty, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Aiming to create environmentally rich school grounds

Sue Munro, Greenspace Officer, NatureScot

Nature Discovery Map Scotland (NDMS) is an exciting new toolkit for schools, designed to get young people learning outside and connecting to nature in their school grounds and local area. It encourages schools to take positive action for the twin emergencies of biodiversity loss and climate change, by making improvements to their school grounds for nature and climate resilience, thereby building their own resilience in facing a changing world.

Using ArcGIS online software, this toolkit is powerful and flexible, and will support schools with Learning for Sustainability (LfS). It also supports digital literacy and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), and helps build valuable skills in the young workforce of the future. Additionally, it gets young people and their teachers out into greenspaces, which is known to be good for physical and mental wellbeing.

The NDMS toolkit is a suite of map-based tools that have been developed by NatureScot on behalf of Scottish Government and in collaboration with teachers and pupils. The toolkit allows schools to:

• look at their school grounds with fresh eyes and capture a visual record.

• discover and audit what habitats, land cover and sustainability features they have in their school grounds and upload these to the national map.

• plan what improvements they want to make to their school grounds using the results of the audit.

• act to make these improvements a reality, empowering young people to make a difference.

• look again to track change in their school grounds over time. The process will take schools on a ‘journey of discovery’ that should result in positive change across the school estate in Scotland.

The toolkit consists of a suite of six mapping tools or ‘apps’ and supporting resources accessed through the NDMS Hub (nature-discovery-map-scotland-ndms.hub.arcgis.com). The resources include educational activities and help topics to support teachers in the use of the toolkit. Once the teachers become familiar with the different functionality in the different apps, they will find they will be able to use the toolkit in many other ways to support different areas of the curriculum. Not all schools in Scotland have access to the same level of digital infrastructure, so the toolkit has been developed to be flexible enough to allow schools and teachers to use it at different levels and in different ways.

Of the six apps in the toolkit, three are public and three (which allow schools to add data to the map) require schools to register to access them. The six tools are:

• Nature Mapper (publicly accessible): an interactive map with lots of functionality and a variety of nature-related data layers to explore. This allows the students to start to develop skills around interpreting data in relation to the world around them.

• Explorer App (registration required): a mobile app for older age/stage pupils to add point, line, and area data to the national map.

• Discoverer App (registration required): a simpler mobile app for younger age/stage pupils to add point data to the national map.

• Mark It App (registration required): an app to help teachers verify and publish the data collected by pupils to the national map.

• Local Dashboard (publicly accessible): an interactive map and charts to help schools explore the data they have added to the map.

• National Dashboard (publicly accessible): an interactive map and charts to help schools explore the data they have added at the local authority, regional or national level.

The NDMS is designed to work in synergy with other established initiatives, such as Eco-Schools and the Climate Ready School Grounds programmes, and signposts other relevant resources for schools. Soft-launched in November 2024, it is hoped this toolkit will be rolled out to primary and secondary schools across all Scottish local authorities over the next year.

The concept comes from a UK Government announcement made at the COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021, to develop a National Education Nature Park. A slightly different approach is being taken in Scotland, to embrace sustainability as well as nature to support LfS which underpins the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence.

Scotland’s LfS Action Plan 2023–2030 is framed round a new ‘Target 2030’ vision: “To build an inspiring movement for change so every 3–18 place of education becomes a Sustainable Learning Setting by 2030.” It is hoped the NDMS will bring us one step closer to realising this vision.

“This toolkit will support schools with Learning for Sustainability.”

The legacy of Shackleton’s Scouts

Alan Noake MBE and Dr Jan Chojecki, founding trustees, ReQuest Foundation

Back in January 2022, a team of ten Scouts from Scotland and Kent went on the voyage of a lifetime to Antarctica on the 100-year-old tall ship Bark Europa, recreating the ethos of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s last voyage, the Shackleton-Rowett, or Quest, expedition.

“The role of mentors is invaluable to guide and encourage young people.”

In 1921, in a nationwide competition, Shackleton selected two Scouts, James Marr from Aberdeen and Norman Mooney from Orkney, to join the Quest’s crew and be the first Scouts ever to join a polar expedition. James Marr went on to a distinguished career in polar exploration and science. He led Operation Tabarin in 1943 and was instrumental in establishing the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, the forerunner of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

One hundred years later, two more scouts from Scotland, Sam Payne and Alex Maciver, joined the ReQuest2021 Antarctic Research Project team. Each ReQuest2021 project member was tasked to complete a personal project of their own conception. Sam’s, for example, was to launch two Argo network floats (argo.ucsd.edu) into the Antarctic waters of the Drake Passage. At the time of writing both floats are still active, and have travelled over 3,000km gathering data including temperature and salinity. See fleetmonitoring. euro-argo.eu/float/6904091 and fleetmonitoring.euro-argo.eu/ float/6904093 for details of their progress. There are currently over 4,000 floats active worldwide, but only 168 in the Southern Ocean.

The ReQuest2021 team also carried out a group task, the Antarctica Scout Krill Project, highlighting the importance of krill to the Southern Ocean food chain and as a key indicator species generally. The project was inspired by James Marr’s seminal work The Natural History and Geography of the Antarctic Krill (Euphausia superba ‘Dana’), which was published in Discovery Reports in 1962. The ReQuest2021 team partnered with BAS, who kindly provided a replica Nansen net for krill larvae sampling, enabling calibration of historic data. With the appropriate permits in place, the team collected samples at 12 different locations around the Antarctic Peninsula. The samples were sent to BAS in Cambridge and were included in subsequent publications in the scientific literature.

Other individual ReQuest2021 projects covered a range of polar-relevant topics across science and the humanities, reflecting how these remote global regions are of meaning to almost every aspect of our day-to-day lives and, of course, our future.

As well as achieving the voyage itself, the ReQuest2021 project had several predefined overarching objectives, including post-voyage activities such as dissemination and legacy to inspire and enable more young people towards similar goals. To this end, in November 2023, the ReQuest Foundation (www.requestfoundation.org.uk) was formed with the following charity objective: “For the public benefit, the advancement in life of young people in the United Kingdom aged between their 16th and 25th birthdays to grow and develop as individuals by providing grants to enable members of the Scout and Guide Movements (and, where funds allow, members of other youth organisations) to undertake developmental activities (including expeditions) in relation to the polar regions which focus on learning, research and the dissemination of their findings.”

The foundation is now in the process of building links with established polar-related organisations to help with communication and dissemination and to develop a pool of project partners and individual mentors. The role of mentors is invaluable to guide and encourage young people with their chosen polar project. It will also be a prerequisite that all young people participating will have to produce a full report of their project to evidence their efforts and contribution.

The ReQuest Foundation’s founding trustees include three of the young people who were part of the original ReQuest2021 Antarctic Research Project. The foundation is currently finalising governance and administrative procedures. In spring 2025 ReQuest will be launching its first calls to offer grants and support to even more young people to undertake polar projects. A fitting legacy of Shackleton’s Scouts.

Alan Noake is the author of Shackleton’s Scouts (2021). Jan Chojecki is the author of The Quest Chronicle (2022).

The Kent Scouts ReQuest2021 Antarctic Research Project team. © Alan Noake

The ReQuest2021 team preparing the Nansen net on deck for krill sampling. © Alan Noake

South Georgia and the eradication of non-native species

Andrew Dawson, Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands

Two hundred and fifty years ago, on 17 January 1775, Captain James Cook claimed the uninhabited island that is now called South Georgia for the British Crown at a ceremony in the imaginatively named Possession Bay. We thus have him to thank for bringing South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, with its stunning landscapes and its amazing precious wildlife, into the wider British family.

When Cook landed on the island, he noted the huge abundance of fur seals, elephant seals and whales. When word of this discovery spread, it led, ultimately, to unconstrained harvesting. Unsustainable practices meant that in just a few decades fur seal populations were nearly wiped out, and thus attention switched to harvesting whales and elephant seals for their oil. For around sixty years (c1904–64) South Georgia was one of the main centres of the whaling industry. Whaling stations were set up around the coastline and the islands played host to more than a thousand men and very few women (one of the census returns suggests over 1,300 men and only four women). The whalers were typically from either Scotland or Norway; that’s why so many of the island’s place names are either Scottish or Norwegian.

Leaving aside the predation of marine mammals, humans brought other significant environmental damage to South Georgia, such as the erection and subsequent abandonment of whaling stations full of asbestos, heavy fuel oils, etc, and the introduction of non-native species. Some of these nonnative species, like the reindeer, were introduced deliberately. Others, such as the rats and mice and a host of plants, arrived accidentally; it is suggested that dandelions arrived accidentally in soil placed on a whaler’s grave from his home in Norway.

Between 2011 and 2015 the Scottish-based charity the South Georgia Heritage Trust undertook the world’s largest rodent eradication project. They used helicopters to spread poison

“It is suggested that dandelions arrived accidentally in soil placed on a whaler’s grave.”

bait across the island. In parallel with this, the Government eradicated the invasive reindeer. The reindeer were causing significant damage to vegetation and burrowing birds’ nests. It was the removal of invasive reindeer which brought the impacts of invasive plants into focus.

The Government is working with Indigena Biosecurity International from New Zealand to eradicate or manage non-native plants such as bittercress, procumbent pearlwort and berry lobelia. Whilst some species such as dandelion and annual meadow grass are too widespread to manage effectively, other species have been prioritised according to their distribution. High priority species are being managed to zero population density by treating all adult plants discovered with herbicide. Other species are more widespread and so are tackled on a site by site basis, with populations being reduced each year.

As you would expect, the herbicide is used in a highly targeted way so as to minimise the impact on native plants.

The team doing this work are often working in some of the most remote and beautiful parts of South Georgia. They have to be experienced not only in plant identification but also in working safely, and respectfully, around South Georgia’s now abundant fur seal population, its jagged landscape and its often inhospitable weather conditions.

We do hope you’ll come and visit South Georgia. Sustainable tourism that is respectful of the precious environment is welcomed. However, that does mean you will have to respect our stringent biosecurity measures, and ensure that you don’t bring in anything that may have to be eradicated later!

Captain Cook taking possession of South Georgia

Captain James Cook took possession of South Georgia in what we’d like to think was a highlight of his second voyage of discovery. Never mind his second circumnavigation of the globe, his historic visits to Australia, New Zealand and countless idyllic South Pacific islands. Let’s ignore his masterly navigation, his use of the K1 chronometer and his extraordinarily accurate charting, some of which is still used today. It must have been his claiming possession of the Isle of Georgia (as he called it) that was the highlight for him.

The fact that Cook was looking for Terra Australis, which he didn’t find as it didn’t exist, or that he was looking for Bouvet Island and in particular its curiously named Cape Circumcision, we can gently ignore. We perhaps should also ignore Cook’s evident lack of imagination when it came to naming features, such as: Cape Disappointment, reflecting the fact that South Georgia was not part of a much larger landmass; or Bird Island, because there were a lot of birds; or Bay of Isles, because there were lots of isles… And of course that’s even before we ponder just how many ‘Georgias’ and ‘Sandwiches’ the world needs now, or indeed needed then.

Cook was going to name his ‘Sandwich Islands’ ‘Snowland’ (no doubt because there was lots of snow). However, he changed his mind as he wanted to reserve that name for the continent he conjectured existed, and which we now know as Antarctica.

We have a short account of what occurred in Possession Bay (another great name) penned by an accompanying German naturalist, Georg Foster. After having recorded that they landed in Possession Bay three times, Foster noted, “Here Captain Cook displayed the British flag, and performed the ceremony of taking possession of those barren rocks, in the name of his Britannic Majesty, and his heirs forever. A volley of two or three muskets was fired into the air.”

South Georgia from the air. © Andrew Dawson

Harmful algal blooms in Scotland: an HABitual problem

Linda May and Toni Dwyer, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

In Scotland, climate change is causing rising temperatures, milder winters and heavier rainfalls. The temperatures of lakes and rivers have already increased by up to 2.5°C, creating ideal conditions for harmful algal blooms (HABs) to flourish. Extended periods of temperatures above 17°C, combined with low flushing rates, increase the likelihood that cyanobacteria will accumulate.

HABs typically appear as green or brown scums on water surfaces and are usually caused by cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae. Despite being a ‘natural’ part of freshwater ecosystems, cyanobacteria can be harmful because they release cyanotoxins into the water. If touched or ingested, these toxins can cause severe health issues in humans and animals, such as skin irritation, vomiting, and fever. These toxins have been linked to fatalities in dogs, horses, cattle, birds and fish, across the UK and beyond.

Three key factors drive HAB formation: warmer water temperatures, periods of strong sunlight, and high phosphorus concentrations. Reducing any one of these elements could help mitigate the risk of HABs occurring.

Case study: Loch Leven

could be caused by increases in discharges and runoff, the long-term data suggest that it is more likely that prolonged periods of high temperatures and low flushing rates are responsible. Under these conditions, phosphorus that has accumulated in the loch sediments is released into the water column. This happens in summer, so it quickly accelerates the growth and accumulation of blooms in the water.

Is the problem getting worse?

To get a better picture of the current spread of HABs across our lakes and reservoirs, UKCEH has developed the Bloomin’ Algae app for mobile phones, which is free to download and allows the public to report HABs wherever they see them. Users upload images of suspected blooms and these are checked by experts. If a cyanobacterial bloom is confirmed, it is assumed to be potentially hazardous and added to an online map that is updated regularly. This warns of potential risks to public and animal health.

“We need to manage nutrient inputs to our waterbodies better.”

Loch Leven, Scotland’s largest shallow lowland loch, covers an area of 13.7km² and has an average depth of 3.9m.

Researchers from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) have monitored the loch for more than 57 years.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, recurring HABs were linked to phosphorus pollution, most of which was coming from an industrial source, wastewater treatment works, septic tanks and farmland. A restoration programme was implemented that reduced phosphorus inputs by 12 tonnes per year (60%) by 1995. This led to fewer algal blooms and a return to good water quality.

Since 2015, phosphorus levels have increased and troublesome algal blooms have reappeared. Although these

Users can also opt to receive notifications of confirmed blooms in their area, which is particularly useful to those engaging in recreational activities such as water sports, angling, wild swimming or dog walking. These crowd-sourced data also improve our understanding of the distribution and severity of blooms so that they can be managed better.

What does the future hold?

With climate change increasing across Scotland, the Centre of Expertise for Waters funded a study to explore the likely impact of this on standing water quality by 2080. It showed that, unless we adopt a more sustainable lifestyle, 71% of our lochs and reservoirs will fail water quality targets by 2080 compared to only 15% if we change to a more sustainable lifestyle.

To improve water quality, or prevent its degradation, we need to manage nutrient inputs to our waterbodies better, because increases in water temperature and levels of sunlight cannot be controlled. Using less fertiliser could reduce phosphorus runoff by about 20% by 2080, whereas continuing current practices would increase it by about 20%. Controlling the release of nutrients from loch and reservoir sediments is more challenging, because sediment removal or chemical treatments are costly and risk the release of heavy metals and residual toxins into the water. It is likely that reducing runoff through sustainable land management is a more practical and costeffective approach.

A collaborative way forward

Protecting Scotland’s waters requires a holistic approach involving farmers, landowners, environmental regulators and policymakers. By codeveloping sustainable solutions, we can safeguard water quality and biodiversity, and protect our aquatic ecosystems for future generations. Collaboration, innovation, and community involvement are key to tackling this HABitual problem.

HAB of Gloeotrichia at Loch Leven, September 2024. © Toni Dwyer

The Seawilding Garden

Tiziana Tedoldi, General Manager, Seawilding

Seagrass (Zostera marina), the ocean’s only flowering plant, will take centre stage for the first time at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show this year. The Seawilding Garden (www.seawilding.org/chelsea) aims to draw attention to the efforts we are making to reverse the effects of marine biodiversity loss and call for better protection of the UK’s seabed.

The Seawilding Garden is inspired by the coastal landscape of Loch Craignish, a remote Scottish sea loch and the heart of our operations. At the front of the garden, a saltwater pool, planted with seagrass, emerges from sandstone rocky outcrops. A stone path leads past a pebble beach and the saltwater environment, separating it from a freshwater bog area that leads to an informal seating space. Framed by native trees at the rear of the garden, a 2.5m-high seagrass sculpture made from recycled scrap metal rises from the landscape and flows over the seating rocks, visually connecting the land-based garden to the seagrass at the front. The garden planting is wild in character, with native species that are found in or should be found around the loch. After the show, the garden will be relocated back to Craignish for community use and maintained by local volunteers.

filters around 200 litres of water in 24 hours), sequestering carbon, and contributing substantially to inshore biodiversity by creating reefs that become hot spots for marine life as well as fish spawning grounds. They too have almost all disappeared owing to human predation, declining water quality and disease.

What sets Seawilding apart is our community-led approach. Launched in 2020, we empower coastal communities to take an active role in restoring their inshore waters. As our CEO Danny Renton explains, “This garden is not just a showcase; it’s a story of how communities can lead the fight to restore marine ecosystems. It’s a call to action for people, businesses and governments to prioritise ocean health as part of the climate solution. By putting restoration in the hands of those most connected to their coastline, we’re not only repairing ecosystems but also building a movement that ensures long-term stewardship of our seas.”

“When given the chance, marine habitats can bounce back astonishingly quickly.”

The Seawilding Garden has been designed by Ryan McMahon of MUSA Landscape Architecture, who said, “We are working with Rare British Plants to include a number of rare native plants, some only found at one location in Scotland, bringing one of the core objectives of Seawilding to the garden: restoring lost biodiversity. Shells and pebbles from local beaches will be collected by Seawilding’s youth group, the Seawildlings, and local primary school children will grow some of the plants in the garden.”

Seagrass meadows are some of the most biodiverse and valuable ecosystems on the planet, providing essential shelter for marine life, nursing grounds for commercially important fish, sequestering carbon, stabilising the seabed and protecting coastlines from erosion. Yet, 95% of the UK’s seagrass meadows have been lost due to pollution, disease, and physical disturbances such as bottom trawling.

Native oysters, another focus of our efforts, were once abundant along the UK coastline. They are ‘ecosystem engineers’, filtering and cleaning water (a mature oyster

While our work is groundbreaking, it highlights a stark reality: only 5% of British waters are protected, with much of the seabed still vulnerable to destructive activities like bottom trawling, a practice that drags heavy dredges and nets across the ocean floor, obliterating habitats in its wake. This method not only devastates marine ecosystems but also undermines restoration efforts.

The solution is clear: true protection. Coastal waters must be safeguarded from harmful practices if ecosystems like seagrass meadows are to recover and thrive. Countries such as Greece and Sweden have already implemented bans on bottom trawling in sensitive areas. The UK must follow suit, extending robust protections to inshore waters and beyond.

Research has shown that when given the chance, marine habitats can bounce back astonishingly quickly. Case studies from Scotland’s only no-take zone and few marine protected areas reveal thriving biodiversity and increased fish stocks within just a few years of protection.

Seawilding’s vision demonstrates that change is possible, starting from the grassroots and scaling up to global significance. Protecting the seabed isn’t just an environmental necessity; it’s an opportunity to rebuild connections with the natural world and leave a legacy of resilience and restoration for generations to come.

Underwater gardening in Loch Craignish, helping to establish a new seagrass meadow.

A thriving seagrass meadow in Loch Craignish.

Down to the river

Brian J D’Arcy, RSGS member

In a glass case in Kendal museum is a chunk of polished rock found in the peaty soil of Levens Moss, between the River Kent and the River Gilpin. That stone artefact speaks of life 5–6,000 years ago, when the Kent and its tributaries were already fixtures of a post-glacial landscape, from the slopes of Harter Fell and Kentmere Common down to Morecambe Bay.

The ancient inhabitants of that forested landscape would have had an intimate knowledge of the river. Food was to be found in the shellfish beds of the estuary and bay, with crayfish and freshwater pearl mussels in the freshwater reaches. Salmon gathered in the estuary, rested in deep pools upriver, and then fought their way upstream to spawn in the clean gravels of the upper reaches. Spring brought thousands of elvers, a black wriggling mass moving slowly but relentlessly upstream to disperse and grow into eels. Gradually the forests gave way to farming, and finally the landscapes of today. The river system was modified, with lades created to drive mills and supply water for industrial development. Progressive improvements at the main industrial sites with discharges to the rivers have allowed recovery from earlier pollution impacts.

“People have been swimming in the Kent for generations.”

And in the mix of the turbulent swirling river is storm sewage. Some of the best wild river sections are downstream of Staveley and Kendal, at risk from sewer overflows. The old sewer systems cannot cope with the more intense, longer duration rainfall being experienced now, releasing a mix of sewage and rainfall into the river. Many old combined sewers were already struggling, since they were designed in a period when washing machines, waste disposal units and daily showers were unimagined.

Rosie swims in the River Kent, but “only upstream of the village.” The sewers in Staveley occasionally surcharge in heavy rainfall, but most often it is intermittent discharges of settled sewage (not fully treated) from the storm tank at the downstream sewage works which concern the swimmers. A Clean the River Kent Campaign has been running since 2021, bringing together interested parties to press for effective remedial actions and protection for the river system. Their activities and achievements include systematic surveys of water quality. Citizen science exemplified.

In 1984 a £2m flood prevention scheme condemned the dry-weather River Kent to flow meekly through an open boxshaped channel in Kendal, flanked by flat swathes of concrete over which flood flows spilled. Forty years on, another attempt to tame the river is underway, with new flood walls and structural protection. Mercifully, the River Kent upstream of Kendal is still semi-natural: meanders take the river away from the roads; shallow gravels and deeper pools allow a variety of wildlife to thrive; riparian woodland lines the banks. People have been swimming in the Kent and its tributaries for generations. Jean Colston learned to swim in the Gowan, a tributary which joins the Kent in Staveley; her father excavated a pool and Jean learned how a river can be a recreation and a joy, and how to avoid hazards. Anne Haywood learned to swim in Windermere, and is proud to have swum there “towing a giant turd, not a real one” to highlight storm sewage pollution. Anne describes beautifully why people swim in the River Kent. “Floating, looking up at the trees, seeing reflections from sun and water dappling the trunks and the rocks. Swimming, hard against the current, and drifting back down. Being pounded and massaged under waterfalls. Gliding quietly, seeing swallows swooping, beautiful demoiselles flitting, fish rising. You’re in a different dimension, a different element with a different perspective and at one with the natural environment.”

Unfortunately, two factors are still causing pollution. More intense and prolonged rainstorms mobilise huge quantities of sediment from the landscape. This diffuse pollution includes nutrients from fertiliser, and faecal pathogens from livestock and bird roosts. Another Staveley swimmer, Rosie Law, notes that they keep out of the river when it is in spate, but that is when her husband takes to his kayak, steering through a turbid torrent as the river plunges through gorges and surges over gravels and rocks.

United Utilities have responded to the pollution issues by establishing a community programme of dialogue and information on plans for extending capacity at the sewage treatment works. That’s not a quick solution, nor a complete one. In the interim, they have provided several raised bed raingardens (SuDSPods) in Staveley, the first wave of actions to try and slow the flow into the sewers. The SuDSPods are manufactured from recycled plastic by Green Blue Urban, whose engineer James Dalrymple explained, “These raingardens can accept up to four times their own internal storage capacity because the rainwater is slowly released continuously, throughout a rainstorm, over a longer time.”

The ancient oak–ash forests which once clothed the fells and valleys of Cumbria are long gone. But the watercourses remain. Although so much has changed in the Kent catchment, citizen science, innovative engineering and most importantly the love of local people for their river and environment give hope for the future. Whether experienced in spate by adventurous kayakers, or by swimmers drifting gently downstream, or by children splashing in the shallows, the Kent is important to people.

Family enjoyment by gravel banks and wooded fringe. © Clean River Kent Campaign

Coastal foraging

Mark Williams, Galloway Wild Foods

Foraging is not about looking for rare or unusual species, but recognising abundance and learning how to sensitively harvest and eat it. Hedgerows are rich with vibrant herbs in the spring and drip with fruit in the autumn. Woods are good hunting grounds for shade-loving edible plants like wild garlic and wood sorrel, and come alive with fungi in the autumn. But the greatest abundance of wild ingredients is found around our coast.

To the uninitiated this can seem surprising, as our shores bear the brunt of hostile, salty winds and storm-driven tides that can rip up all but the very deepest of roots.

But the very hostility of their habitat has forced coastal plants into some ingenious adaptations. To resist wind and salt, many have become succulent, a fortuitous evolution for the human palate. Take sea beet (Beta vulgaris ssp maritima) for example – a coastal spinach that produces large, thick, glossy leaves all year round. It is the ancestor of many cultivated crops including beetroot, sugar beet and chard, but tastes better and has a higher nutritional content than any of them. Cultivated spinach disappears to virtually nothing when cooked, but the thick, glossy leaves of sea beet remain substantial, with a rich iron flavour and a salty tang. Look for it above the strand line on shingle beaches, clinging to sea cliffs and anchored to coastal defences.

addition to a stir-fry, and laver (Porphyra spp) is very closely related to the nori that you find wrapped around sushi rolls. Research is currently underway into the effects of eating wild foods such as these on the gut biome. Preliminary results suggest they are extremely good for us, not least because of the biodiverse diet they encourage.

With current populations and land use patterns, nobody is suggesting wild food as a panacea for our sickly food system, but an increasing body of research is exploring how it can contribute to healthier eating, improved mental health, resilience and nature connection. Foraging challenges embedded assumptions about where our food comes from.

Where exposed shingle gives way to muddy estuaries more nutritious treats can be found. Most people are aware of marsh samphire (Salicornia spp), a succulent plant that looks like a mini cactus, from its presence in fishmongers. Less are aware that there are areas around the UK coast where it grows in large quantities and can be responsibly thinned then used as a mouth-watering vegetable. Salt marshes boast even more succulent delicacies, like sea aster (Tripolium pannonicum), a member of the daisy family esteemed by top chefs, and sea arrowgrass (Triglochin maritima), which looks like ordinary grass but has a strong and surprising kick of coriander.

Below the high tide line there is an even greater abundance of wild food resources.

Seaweed is perhaps the single largest relatively untapped food resource in the UK. When I mention this on my guided forays, the most common reaction used to be “Yes, I know it’s edible, but it’s like chewing a mouthful of salty rubber!” But this attitude is quickly changing. Lost traditions of seaweed consumption in the UK are being re-explored by foragers, inspired by how it is used in Japanese cuisine. Emerald green sea lettuce (Ulva spp) makes a vibrant

The marginal coastal species that foragers take an interest in are of increasing interest to scientists for their resilience to rising sea levels and climate change. They may well be the crops of the future. Seaweed cultivation, for example, is relatively benign compared to other models of aquaculture, and has the potential to absorb excess nutrients from fish farms. As interest in foraging rises, so do questions about how to do it ethically and sustainably. The Association of Foragers was established in 2015 as a professional network of foraging teachers who promote considerate foraging, nature connection and ecological stewardship, by connecting people with wild plants, seaweeds and fungi for use in food, drink and medicine. Members sign up to a set of principles and research and advise on best practice for foragers.

Mark Williams is a full-time foraging guide who shares his lifelong love of wild foods through Galloway Wild Foods. He runs courses and guided walks across the UK, but mostly in Scotland. To learn more about how to forage safely, legally and sustainably, visit www.gallowaywildfoods.com. To learn more about the Association of Foragers, see foragersassociation.org

“Salt marshes boast even more succulent delicacies, like sea aster and sea arrowgrass.”

Sea beet shore. © Mark Williams

Spring bounty pallet. Mark Williams

Change is the only constant

Dr Janet Brown FRSE, Convener, Education Committee, Royal Society of Edinburgh

Every generation sees change, but I think we can all agree that the technological advances of the last decades have resulted in a transformation in almost all aspects of life and of work. As we move into the second quarter of the 21st century, it is no secret that the digital world is becoming increasingly inescapable, causing the ground to shift beneath our feet like never before.

The world that children entering primary school today will inhabit as adults in 2040 will be very different. We must ask ourselves if our education and skills system is preparing them to be successful and happy in this new world, and how to make said system future-proof if the only thing we know for certain is that it will change.

Last year the Royal Society of Edinburgh released two reports highlighting the need for a fundamental review of Scotland’s approach to the reform of education and skills that consider this rapidly changing environment. The first, Moral support: using the curriculum to foster ethical literacy in learners, was developed by the Learned Societies Group. This publication highlights the need to ensure that the underlying ethical principles that govern knowledge generation are clear and understood by young people. The report posits that ethical literacy does not happen spontaneously, and proposed that this must be an explicit aim of the education system.

The second report, Education and skills 2050: Future proofing Scotland, suggests that Scotland needs to move beyond shortterm reform actions, and puts forward the challenge to be bold in reforming the education and skills system to ensure that it best serves the needs of a modern Scotland.

There continues to be much debate about whether education should focus on knowledge or skills. The reality is that we all require both: the development of a strong and appropriate knowledge base over time, but also, importantly, the skills with which to apply that knowledge. Access to education and training throughout life is now an essential component of any system, which allows individuals to develop and contribute as industries change and new opportunities arise.

As Convener of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Education Committee, which produced the Education and skills 2050: Future proofing Scotland report, I believe we are starting from a strong base. The report lists ten calls to action to stimulate a discussion about what Scotland wants its education sector to look like in 2050 and beyond, and what changes are needed to achieve this vision. The first call to action is critical: to agree on the purposes of Scottish education and what success looks like. It is often said that ‘you get what you measure’, so the criteria for success at an individual, institution and system level must be the right ones to ensure that Scotland and its people achieve the economic, societal and climate change goals to which we aspire. Education should benefit the individual

through enabling personal development, satisfaction and fulfilment. Education is also crucial to the economic and social success of a nation, requiring a strong corporate base and a highly skilled workforce.

Scotland needs a system-wide, long-term strategy for education and skills development that is aligned with our national

“There continues to be much debate about whether education should focus on knowledge or skills.”

objectives. Reviews such as that undertaken into qualification and assessment reform have proposed changes that have been met with divided opinions. How and what is assessed and what is celebrated as success will have a profound effect on what the education system focuses on.

Given the increasing pace of change, now is the time for a fundamental review of the curriculum, not only at the subject level but also reflecting on the value of inter-disciplinarity, a focus on the skills and knowledge needed in the digital age, and the opportunities afforded by advances in technology to learning and teaching. The contribution of teachers and lecturers to this change is vital, but change will not happen if society in general does not support the way forward.

Education and skills 2050 does not provide the answers to these challenges. Rather, it highlights the need for a wider debate to develop a coherent, system-wide and inclusive approach to reforming our education and skills system so that it supports both development of individuals and the future success of Scotland.

FURTHER READING

Royal Society of Edinburgh (2024) Education and skills 2050: Future proofing Scotland (rse.org.uk/programme/ advice-paper/education-and-skills-2050-future-proofing-scotland)

Pupils learning about energy production from a model windmill in class. Image by Rawpixel.com from Shutterstock.

Reforming Geography and the Scottish Education System

Professor Kenneth Muir FRSGS, Trustee, RSGS

Much has been made by teachers and others in education about the bewildering array of reports on reforming Scottish education commissioned in recent years by the Scottish Government (Morgan; Muir; Harris/Campbell; Hayward; Withers) that appear to many, to date, to have produced little by way of meaningful action.

However, be in no doubt, reform is afoot, although busy teachers might not yet be fully aware of it, or its subject implications. From statements made by the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Jenny Gilruth, and from what is already happening, that reform is most likely to be a process of evolution rather than revolution. Whatever the timescale, it will have a direct impact on the Geography curriculum and how the subject is taught and assessed in the years ahead. Currently, there is an Education Reform Bill going through its stages in the Scottish Parliament. That Bill covers only the creation of Qualifications Scotland (QS) to replace the current Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), and the creation of an independent education Inspectorate. As a result, there are obvious concerns among practitioners as to how much these largely structural alterations of national bodies will impact on subjects like Geography. While that concern may be uppermost in the minds of teachers, there are also deeper questions about the extent to which the Bill will change the culture and mindset required to ensure the Scottish education system truly meets the needs of all learners for the fastchanging and unpredictable world in which they will live.

One feature that is intended to emerge from the structural alteration of creating the new qualifications and awarding body, QS, is greater transparency, engagement and communication with practitioners on the ground. The planned Strategic Advisory Board for QS has the potential to hold the new body to account more than has been the case with SQA. The new, planned Teacher and Practitioner Charter and Interest Committee and the Learner Charter and Interest Committee are designed to give greater voice to those on the ground most affected by QS’s work. There is, therefore, the potential for teachers to have their concerns and suggestions better heard as a result of these provisions in the Bill. It remains to be seen if this happens in practice.

It’s a similar story with the creation in the Bill of a new, independent Inspectorate. Early suggestions from the Cabinet Secretary point to changes in the way subjects and schools will be inspected, post-pandemic. Also, that HGIOS (How Good Is Our School?) will change, with initial work to refresh the framework for school inspection already underway.

Running in parallel with the Education Reform Bill are a number of developments

that will have a direct impact on Geography. Dr Lynne Robertson, Senior Education Officer for Social Studies in Education Scotland, has been recruiting approximately 40 Geography practitioners to be part of a wider Social Studies Collaboration Group who will draw up proposed changes to the Geography curriculum and assessment 3–18, as part of Education Scotland’s wider Curriculum Improvement Cycle (CIC). Two, of a planned three, discussion papers on the CIC are available on the Education Scotland website (see further reading).

“Geography teachers should be reassured.”

Current, and in some cases long-standing, concerns of geographers, such as curriculum content and competencies; assignments; the place of fieldwork; clarity of marking assessment; Geography in the primary curriculum; the potential place and teaching of climate change, sustainability and GIS; the role of interdisciplinary learning; and much more, are all on the agenda for consideration.

The Collaboration Group will have its first meeting before the summer break, and the whole process will be supported by the recruitment of a Geography National Adviser. The work of the Collaboration Group will include ongoing engagement with as wide a range of teachers as possible through various virtual and in-person events. Details on all these ongoing CIC developments will be posted on the Education Scotland website (education.gov.scot).

The outputs from all that is happening in Geography 3–18, and other subjects, won’t be realised in practice for some time. However, Geography teachers should be reassured that everything is being done to hear the concerns and ideas of experts on the ground to influence the future of Geography.

The recent report from the RSE, Education and skills 2050: Future proofing Scotland, suggests a plan for reforming Scottish education over the next 25–30 years. That may well be the timescale over which real system change is made, not least given the focus on the very real issues practitioners are dealing and working with in our post-pandemic environment. Addressing student attendance, behavioural issues, mental health issues, staffing and resources certainly limit the scope for reform.

However, reform emanating from review reports, the planned Education Reform Bill and now the RSE report clearly signal that change is only a matter of time. Changes to the Geography curriculum, assessment, examinations, approaches to learning and teaching, and much more are all likely to be coming over the horizon. Geographers are well placed and must be ready to seize these opportunities afforded by the reform process to enhance the subject, its status and the future prospects of the learners who choose to study our wonderful subject.

FURTHER READING

Education Scotland (2024) Background and A Case For Change (blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/cices/2024/12/18/ new-curriculum-improvement-cycle-discussion-paper-backgroundand-a-case-for-change)

Education Scotland (2024) Towards an Evolved Technical Framework (blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/ cices/2024/12/18/discussion-paper-2)

Is a shrinking and narrower higher education inevitable?

Dr Richard Budd, Lecturer in Higher Education, University of Lancaster

UK higher education (HE) is in distress. Most universities appear to be in deficit and responding in the only way they know how, citing external factors while lacerating staff numbers, disciplinary breadth, and other functions. While this might address some immediate balance sheet woes, it fails to resolve many underlying tensions and will have wide-ranging, long-term, primarily negative effects.

The past decade or so has presented universities with enormous challenges. Some of these were imposed, such as the global financial crisis, Covid-19, and wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere. A revolving cast of varyingly professional politicians and associates initially responded with austerity that prolonged the recession, laid the groundwork for a divisive Brexit that consumed policy makers’ attention, and left Britain ill-equipped to cope with the pandemic and subsequent socio-economic stresses. Within this, HE has been subjected to a prolonged period of budget restraint, excessive meddling and oversight, and dog whistle politics. We are now in the red as inflation has risen while fee revenue heads in the opposite direction, chiefly due, initially at least, to frozen domestic fees and international visitors being deterred by exorbitant costs and xenophobic policies. Having a new government which is not openly antagonistic towards universities is a novelty; it sets a low bar, which politicians have cleared merely by making sympathetic noises but doing little of substance. On the one hand we have overdue but marginal per-student income uplifts, and on the other much larger increases in employers’ National Insurance contributions. The state does need to bolster its coffers, but universities were already overstretched and this has left our frailties more chronically exposed.

It might be tempting to see things as ‘the market’ readjusting to a new ‘equilibrium’. What this supposed equilibrium looks like, though, is bleak. We have been drip-fed course closures and redundancies for some time, and these are now accelerating. Internationally, new student markets and opportunities are desperately being sought in the hope that the bank manager can be kept at bay, but the bankruptcy

Student and university debts

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS

After a chance meeting with a number of students who told me about their levels of student debt (anything from £30,000 to £90,000) I admit to being horrified. Scottish students tended to be at the lower end of this scale because of the Scottish Government’s policy on domestic fees, but even so, the prospect of starting out in life, looking for work with a qualification which didn’t guarantee a job, but with tens of thousands of pounds of debt around one’s neck seemed onerous in the extreme. Adding the fact that many students were paying upwards of £750 per month per room on rent for their student flats, I felt it was an issue we needed to help raise more awareness of. In juxtaposition, the news is full of stories of universities and colleges struggling to balance the books, and some reportedly near bankruptcy. How have we arrived at a point where so many students are saddled with such high levels of debt, and yet the universities are also struggling to stay afloat? During 2025 we plan to unpick these two issues, to shed light on what is going on in the world of Higher Education, and to try to understand what can be done to break these cycles.

of one or more universities feels imminent. The immediate impact of that would be felt by (potentially tens of) thousands of students for whom transferring elsewhere is fraught with difficulties. It would also leave scores of dedicated staff high and dry at a time when the HE jobs market is flatlining. The loss of a university may engender schadenfreude in competitors, but the local communities in which those institutions were anchored would be hit hard, potentially becoming ‘cold spots’ where people unable to travel are without access to degrees. The ‘failure’ of one university may also elicit a reaction from lenders to whom others owe large sums, triggering further closures. Continuing to recruit and exploit affluent students from the Global South, though, is still odious and leave us vulnerable to international instability; Britain’s burnished public image, combined with comparable but cheaper options elsewhere, may permanently diminish the attraction of travelling great distances to obtain a degree here.

“The bankruptcy of one or more universities feels imminent.”

Is this prognosis inevitable? Probably, because this iteration of how universities are viewed and run appears depressingly resilient. There are some mitigating circumstances, but leadership groups continue to articulate HE’s contributions in primarily economic terms. Neither they nor parties previously in opposition did much to rebuff ‘value for money’ attacks on socially essential subjects whose only fault is to be chronically underpaid, or to agitate for a funding system where research income covers its costs. The reality of staff workloads, including the goodwill activities that keep academia running, continues to be ignored, with institutions surviving chiefly by poaching others’ domestic students or feeding voraciously in international markets while overinvesting in unnecessary new buildings.

The shortcomings of these competitive, instrumental, metricdriven policies and management approaches have been laid bare, unable to adequately address the issues facing them. Warning bells around a raw ‘business model’ for HE have rung for an age, evident in surveys, scholarship and industrial action: reduced subject ranges, glacial EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) gains, deteriorating student mental health, staff overwork and burnout. Its chief remaining strategy is slash and burn. Moves to cut costs through simplifying procedures and centralising functions may offer some overdue relief, but unpicking and re-braiding structures is complicated, requires time that staff do not have, and can present false economies.

What is needed is a more expansive imagination as to how higher education should be, supported by humility, generosity and a duty of care. At present there is little sign that these are present in sufficient store for things to turn out differently.

Student debt in the UK: a growing challenge for graduates

Nightfox Investigations and Debt Recovery

Data from the Student Loans Company (SLC) reveals that nearly 1.8 million people in the UK carry student debt exceeding £50,000. Among them, over 61,000 individuals owe more than £100,000, and 50 people have debts surpassing £200,000.

Student debt in the UK has been on a steady rise, particularly since the tripling of tuition fees in England. Since 2017, students have faced tuition fees capped at £9,250 per year, with Scottish students paying a maximum of £1,820 and Northern Irish students paying up to £4,710. Despite these caps, the amount of debt students accumulate during their studies has grown significantly. The SLC reports that the average balance for loan holders in England when they begin making repayments has increased from less than £45,000 to £48,470.

Students who pursue multiple or lengthy courses often find themselves with significantly higher loan balances. Additionally, interest accrual plays a substantial role in the rapid growth of debt. While students may initially borrow a specific amount to cover tuition and living expenses, interest can cause these balances to balloon over time, sometimes reaching unmanageable levels.

In early 2024, the BBC reported that the highest student debt in the UK was over £231,000. Three months later, that figure had risen to £252,000. It is unclear whether this new record debt is related to the previously reported figure or represents a separate case. Regardless, the fact that such levels of debt exist highlights the severity of the issue.

during university can hinder graduates’ ability to save for a home, start a family, or pursue further education. Moreover, the psychological toll of carrying such a heavy financial burden can affect mental health and overall well-being.

“A comprehensive review of student finance is needed.”

Repaying these substantial loans is a significant challenge for many graduates. Under the ‘Plan 2 loans’ system, individuals are required to repay 9% of everything they earn over £27,295. However, with the average starting salary for graduates often hovering around this threshold, many find themselves repaying their loans for decades, with little impact on the principal amount due to ongoing interest accrual. Government figures for the 2023–24 financial year show that 2.8 million people in England made student loan repayments. Yet, the vast majority of those repaying their loans owe more than £50,000. This suggests that, despite the large number of individuals making repayments, the overall debt burden remains high, with many facing years of repayments ahead.

The growing student debt crisis sparked debate on the need for reform in the UK’s student finance system. The National Union of Students (NUS) criticised the lack of action from political parties on this issue, calling it “ridiculous” that none of the main parties have offered any significant proposals for reform.

The NUS and other advocacy groups argue that the current system places an undue burden on graduates, particularly those from low-income backgrounds. The debt accumulated

One aspect of the student loan system that provides some relief is the provision for debt writeoffs. Debts are written off at the end of the loan term, regardless of how much is owed at that point. The length of the loan term depends on the specific course and start date, but it typically ranges from 30 to 40 years. However, for many graduates, the prospect of carrying such a large debt for decades is daunting, and the relief of eventual write-off does little to ease the burden in the interim.

As student debt continues to rise, there is a growing recognition that the current system may not be sustainable in the long term. The escalating costs of higher education, combined with the increasing debt burdens on graduates, suggest that a comprehensive review of student finance is needed.

Potential solutions could include a re-evaluation of tuition fees, particularly in England where they are the highest in the UK. Additionally, reforms could be considered to address the interest rates applied to student loans, which contribute to the rapid growth of debt. Another option could be the introduction of more generous repayment terms, allowing graduates to retain more of their earnings and reducing the overall financial strain.

Revelations about the scale of student debt in the UK underscore the urgent need for reform in the student finance system. The current system is placing a significant burden on graduates. The debate over how to address this issue is likely to intensify in the coming years, as more graduates enter the workforce and begin to grapple with the realities of repaying their loans.

It is clear that a sustainable solution is needed to ensure that higher education remains accessible and affordable for future generations. Whether through reduced tuition fees, lower interest rates, or more favourable repayment terms, any reform must aim to alleviate the financial burden on graduates and prevent future cohorts from facing the same challenges. As the conversation continues, it is crucial that the voices of students and graduates are heard, and that their needs are at the forefront of any proposed changes to the system.

Image by Matej Kastelic from Shutterstock.

Image by Kmpzzz from Shutterstock.

New horizons beckon for Geography

John Rutter, former headteacher, champion of education for sustainability

The study of Geography in Scottish schools is on the increase again, after a long period of uncertainty and concern that it was in poor health. The numbers taking the subject at public examination levels are on the rise, and this is feeding into undergraduate and postgraduate study at university. While teacher training intake figures for the subject show a shortfall, it is hoped that the pupils currently at school will translate into future teacher numbers. Gratifyingly (and this may not be an entirely unbiased view) the calibre of new Geography teachers appears to be very high, and the knowledgeable and enthusiastic workforce goes part of the way towards explaining how the decline of the subject has been stemmed. There is no reason to be complacent of course. It is only recently that Geography was in apparent decline, perhaps coincident with the rise in interest in both History and Modern Studies. The former, in particular, was quick to recognise the advantages to be gained in personalising the subject and presenting historical events through the eyewitness testimonies of those who were there. Increasingly over the last 20 years or more, people have learned to love historical stories, and teachers have capitalised on this in the classroom.

“The profile of Geography as a school discipline is rising once again.”

So what can be done to ensure the momentum is maintained in reasserting the popularity of Geography? It seems fairly obvious that there was a dip with the reduction in the number of subjects studied for National level exams from the 2010s onwards, but many schools are now reintroducing seven or eight subject options in S3 and this will undoubtedly have a positive effect. As numbers continue to rise, we need to ensure these pupils stick with the subject through Higher and Advanced Higher, and it may be that an increased profile for the multi-faceted aspects of Learning for Sustainability (LfS) can stimulate such interest.

Target 2030, the Scottish Government’s LfS action plan, calls for all 3–18 learning establishments to be sustainable by the year 2030. It is a response to extensive consultation with children and young people who have called for LfS, climate change and outdoor learning to be a greater feature of their learning. The teaching of Geography is uniquely placed to take advantage of this and to develop a curriculum which addresses these issues. It can do this by bringing the personal experiences of people affected by the climate crisis, increasing population, decolonisation and all manner of concerns from farming to transport systems and infrastructural development to the fore. Geography, because of its holistic worldview, can take the lead on interdisciplinary learning which employers are crying out for. Geography teachers also need to be cognisant of recent developments which are gaining a high profile in education, such as LfS and the Rights Respecting Schools (RRS) programme. Both are connected and complementary, and require a wholeschool and community approach, supported by the school improvement plan.

RRS is a highly worthwhile programme and is currently at the forefront of many school leaders’ thoughts, given that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was incorporated into Scots law in 2024. Crucially, childrens’ rights are mentioned in the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s (GTCS) professional values for teachers, while

sustainability runs as a theme under almost all of the outlined aspects of social justice. The GTCS’s standard for full registration specifically outlines LfS as a “whole-school commitment” to help a school community “develop the knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and practices needed to take decisions which are compatible with a sustainable future in a just and equitable world.” Senior leaders in schools can help raise the profile here in ensuring that individuals are questioned on their commitment to developing LfS knowledge in annual professional reviews.

Finally, if there is to be significant promotion of the importance of LfS at a national level, then the commitment and support of policymakers and educational authorities is pivotal. The challenge will be to ensure LfS has the same profile across the refreshed HMI inspection frameworks as it currently does within the professional standards. There are many good examples across Scotland of how this is being done, through courses developed around ‘big questions’ and incorporation into school values statements, but this good practice needs to be more widely spread and included in new improvement frameworks. This should be supported by HMI using school visits to ask questions on how social justice and education for a sustainable future fit into the ethos of a school. Similarly, strategic opportunities to further embed the LfS entitlement for all learners will be provided through the curriculum improvement cycle and reform to the senior phase which lie ahead.

The profile of Geography as a school discipline is rising once again and, as a community, we need to ensure our voice is heard, taking advantage of the opportunities available and making sure its importance is recognised at the highest levels.

John Rutter is an Education Scotland LfS mentor, but his views here are his own. To learn more about LfS, visit education.gov.scot/ resource-themes/learning-for-sustainability or email lfs@educationscotland.gov.scot

Being Chair of the RSGS Education Committee

Alastair McConnell FRSGS

It has been an absolute honour to chair the RSGS Education Committee over the last five years. As I come to the end of my time in this position, I would like to reflect on what has been achieved and what makes this group so special and unique.

The committee has representation from schools, universities, relevant industries and organisations. It works closely with the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers (SAGT) to develop resources, organise events and liaise with the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and Scottish Government about Geography in Scottish schools.

Online meetings take place three times a year, allowing representation from all parts of the country but without the need for unsustainable travel. The broad range of voices in the meetings contains incredible experience and expertise, and everyone is so positive and enthusiastic about our subject. I would like to thank everyone on the committee for being so supportive of the initiatives we have worked on, and I leave with a real sense of pride over what we have achieved. The Chalk Talks series of videos, covering all sections of the National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher Geography courses, is the first thing that comes to mind. Started during the Covid pandemic as a way of supporting pupils, parents and teachers during school closures, they have become a useful revision and summary tool, gaining over 100,000 total views. The generosity of RSGS members and supporters donating to the funding of this resource, and the willingness

of Geography teachers from across Scotland to give of their time and expertise, was remarkable at a time of great pressure for all concerned.

Developed by Professor Jo Sharp in 2022, the annual writing competition started with an ‘imagine a country’ theme, producing a broad range of submissions from school pupils across the country. The chance to read through such a diverse range of ideas from across the country filled us with hope for the future.

“Walking into the Scottish Parliament to discuss the future of our subject felt very surreal.”

Research on the who and the why of students choosing to study Geography has been led by Ian Selmes, producing three separate academic papers published in the Scottish Geographical Journal (SGJ). The recent resurgence in numbers choosing our subject has been a real positive story over the last few years, and testament to the importance people now place on spatial awareness and the environment.

The Education Conference held at Dollar Academy in February 2023 on the future of Geography brought a wide range of voices and viewpoints into one room, creating an incredible opportunity for discussion and making connections. These connections were further developed with a very successful series of webinars implemented by Professor Kenneth Muir on different aspects of curricular change. The reports from each of these can be found on the RSGS blog.

Meeting with the SQA and the Cabinet Secretary for Education in 2024 was very productive, allowing us to pass on many of the findings from the conference and webinars. The RSGS name opens doors, and walking into the Scottish Parliament to discuss the future of our subject felt very surreal. Just one of the many opportunities and fantastic experiences this role has given me over the last five years.

I would encourage anyone with an interest in geographical education to step up and get involved with the RSGS Education Committee. Taking on the role as Chair has been one of the highlights of my teaching career, and I would like to thank Mike and the RSGS Board for all of their support and encouragement.

RSGS Education Conference, Dollar Academy, February 2023.

RSGS Playground Map at Dollar Academy.

Our community: Margaret Wilkes FRSGS

Holly McNair, Communications Officer, RSGS

When did you first develop your interest in maps?

I had an interest from a very early age. I was six, I think, when my aunt presented me with an atlas that my godfather had owned, produced by John Bartholomew & Son Ltd. It was The Times Atlas of the World, the 1922 edition, which he had owned for most of his life. I can remember lying on my tummy on the floor, just looking at the atlas, and I’ve still got it. I had it repaired because I’d used it so much. So, it was inevitable I think, that interest.

My best subject at school wasn’t geography; actually, it was art. So with maps, I got the best of both. I loved drawing maps when I was young, drawing imaginary islands.

I would like to have done art as a subject, but it wasn’t a university subject in those days, and it didn’t count towards university if you took it at A level. I had to have subjects that would get me into university, and that meant no art. Later, I went to art classes for years at an adult education college, doing more abstract art. The teacher would often ask, “why do you put black lines around everything?” And I would explain that it was because of maps, all my art has black lines around it and it’s due to cartography. So the mixture of geography and art are sort of married in me in cartography.

It is interesting to see how cartography has impacted other areas of your life.

I’ve always had a strong sense of place. I always need to know, in my head, where I am in a place, where the nearest other places are, how it relates to the map as a whole. My father could never understand how I always knew where north was.

You used to work for the National Library of Scotland?

Yes, but I didn’t start there. I started in the Department of Geography in the University of Sheffield in a research post. It involved undertaking research in just about every subject, helping colleagues. A memorable one was Native Americans and their influence on the mapping of North America, and

“I loved drawing maps when I was young, drawing imaginary islands.”

how that information got to Europe to be published in atlases in the 18th century. It was a temporary post, so a colleague said, “why don’t you look for something else.” And there was an advert in The Times for a post at the National Library.

It was a lovely place to work, because in those days you could roam the stacks and there were millions of books to look at. Being in charge of maps was an absolute delight: being able to add to the collections, and meeting people who wished to make donations. Some of the things that would come in were just astonishing.

How did you originally get involved with RSGS?

When the RSGS headquarters were in Edinburgh at Randolph Crescent, Donald Moir, who led the Society, was editing The Early Maps of Scotland, Volumes 1 and 2. He often visited the National Library, so I got to know him well. He passed away in 1986, and I think it was two years later that I was invited to give a talk to RSGS in Edinburgh, in the lecture theatre of what is now the National Museum of Scotland. I decided to dedicate the talk to Donald Moir, so I spoke about early maps. I didn’t join the Society initially, but later in the 1980s I attended an RSGS talk with a colleague, given by the Marketing Manager at Ordnance Survey Scotland. It was about climbing mountains in Chile. I remember when we arrived, on the stairs greeting everyone was Dr Sandy Crosbie, Chair of the RSGS Edinburgh centre. He’d retired by then and he was always wonderfully welcoming; he knew everyone. All the women there looked as though they were going to church, all in their best rig, with hats. I wasn’t wearing my best rig, I was just in my working togs. But it was something of the period, it was something to go out to, something social in Edinburgh. So after that, I thought I’d better join RSGS, and I’ve been a member ever since.

What are some of your favourite memories from your travels?

I have always had such an interest in the Nordic countries. I had always wanted to go to Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroes – and I’ve done all three. Norway, I must have been to five or six times now, and I would dearly love to go back. We climbed up the side of a glacier in the Jostedalsbreen and I dread to think where that glacier has retreated to now; the Supphellebreen glacier near the small settlement of Fjærland. I’ve got photographs of it at home which might be interesting to people today because it was quite a climb. Norway has always held meaning for me. Seeing the northern lights for the first time absolutely bowled me over; I’ve never forgotten it. I am also very fond of the Western Isles. RSGS led a field class there for its members in 1988, led by Professor James Caird, who was a Trustee of the Society in those days. We travelled from Barra to the Butt of Lewis, and there wasn’t an experience he left out. His wife Isa was from North Uist and she spoke in Gaelic to the neighbours. She introduced us to people, her family gave us tea and scones at the little settlement of Sollas in North Uist. It was one of those field classes I’ll never forget.

On another occasion, a friend and I climbed to the top of the highest hill on Barra, Heaval. We were there in the afternoon as the sun was beginning to set, and we just sat at the top, looking right down all the islands. That was one of those moments that later, in an art class, inspired me to paint my heart out to that view, and it still lives with me today. What does geography mean to you?

I suppose I’d have to use a phrase a lot of people do: sense of place. It’s impossible to engage with the world without it. When I’m on a train, I don’t usually bury myself in a book or a tablet. I look out, I take in the landscape. I hear people around me sometimes say, “Oh, what’s that?” and I wish I could jump in and tell them all about it.

Every Monday, when I travel to RSGS, I go with Blair White from the Collections Team. Blair’s a geographer too, and we’re both doing the same thing: looking at the landscape, noticing how it changes.

We watch the tide moving in and out along the coast. What does it reveal? This morning, what stood out was the sheer yellowness of the landscape. Then we pass through what feels like a gorge in the hills, and suddenly, there’s the Tay and the Tay estuary. My first thought isn’t just, “That’s beautiful” (though it is), but “Where’s Dundee? Can I see it?” Yes, I can, and I start placing it all in a geographical context. That’s what geography means to me. It’s how I interpret and see the landscape.

What do you think are some of the standout pieces from the RSGS Collections?

You’d expect me to say a map. Well, not necessarily. I could, but choosing just one would be difficult. It has to be the Visitors Book. You flip through it, seeing name after name,

most of them unrecognisable. Then, suddenly, you come across a name that everyone knows. It might be Fridtjof Nansen. It might be Ernest Shackleton. Then you spot Thor Heyerdahl. And then, there’s a name that makes you stop and think, it can’t be

“Norway has always held meaning for me.”

Margaret Wilkes has been an invaluable RSGS member, volunteer and supporter for four decades. She is a recipient of the RSGS Bartholomew Globe, and was CoChair of the RSGS Edinburgh Group for eight years. She is currently a Trustee and Board member, and is Head of the Collections Team, a group of expert volunteers. And she is co-author of Scotland: Mapping the Nation and Scotland: Mapping the Islands.

Jostedalsbreen, Norway.

Marion Newbigin, RSGS Livingstone Medallist 1924

Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

“One cannot be said to know any part of the Earth’s surface until one realises how it appears in the eyes of its inhabitants.”

For a woman who wanted to be something more than a housewife, the late 19th century was not a great time to be born. A good education, an independent life, an academic career… if a woman wanted any of these, she was gently discouraged on the grounds that it wasn’t quite ‘the thing’. And if she pushed any harder, she risked being ridiculed or ostracised – or both.

But Marion Newbigin was one of the women who broke the mould. The daughter of a pharmacist in Alnwick, Northumberland, she was blessed with forward-thinking parents who encouraged her appetite for learning and were prepared to give her the best education they could afford. Few universities at that time would accept female students, so Marion attended lectures at the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women. Her first and abiding passion was science.

Aberystwyth University was one of the first institutions to open its doors to women, so in 1891, aged 22, Marion enrolled there on a course of study that included chemistry, physics, biology and mathematics. She also attended the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, where she became an assistant to the eminent zoologist J Arthur Thomson.

What distinguished Marion Newbigin from her peers, both male and female, was an ability to grasp the principles of many diverse sciences, from botany to zoology, and present them in clear, unambiguous language that had a structure and a purpose. She was a natural teacher, able to foresee the questions that students would ask, and by all accounts she was a popular lecturer.

“Newbigin hated the concept of ‘Empire’ and considered it largely a product of chance…”

Marion had the clear-sightedness to step back from the political scene of the early 20th century, where the British Empire was still distorting people’s thinking on politics and race. She preferred to take a more objective view of geography, and challenged the accepted idea that racial characteristics were fixed and hereditary, reflecting the environment in which they had arisen. Physical differences in race, she argued, were “of little importance under modern conditions,” and she daringly suggested that ‘race’ was being used as a political tool. In the austere and smoky chambers of gentlemen’s clubs this must have been about as welcome as an overdose of snuff.

“A keen gardener and a great lover of alpine plants, many of which she brought home from abroad, Miss Newbigin was president of the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club for several years and was a great lover of the mountains…”

When the Challenger expedition returned to Britain in 1876, it brought back thousands of natural history specimens, the majority of which were held in Edinburgh; the task of sorting and cataloguing them took many decades. Marion was one of a large team of specialists with the daunting but exciting job of identifying the specimens and analysing the wealth of information brought back from the world’s oceans.

“What distinguished Marion Newbigin was an ability to grasp the principles of many diverse sciences, from botany to zoology.”

By 1898, Marion Newbigin had risen to become one of the best qualified women of her day. She had achieved both a BSc and a DSc, and began lecturing at the School of Medicine for Women, while acting as an external examiner at the University of Aberdeen. She also taught at Patrick Geddes’ summer schools, held at the Edinburgh Outlook Tower.

“Man is man and master of his fate; the world is his, for he has largely made it what it is.”

With her strongly independent nature and her passion for learning, Marion was a lifelong supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. How ironic was the twist of fate when, in 1916, the University of Edinburgh finally yielded to pressure and granted female students full access to its courses in medicine. Marion would have been torn between delight and regret, because her work at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women now disappeared.

In 1902, encouraged by the geologist James Geikie, Marion Newbigin accepted a post as editor of the Scottish Geographical Magazine, the journal of the RSGS. With characteristic dedication, over the next 32 years Marion helped to establish the journal as one of the finest publications of its kind in the world. When she died in 1934 – tragically, on the same day that the RSGS began celebrating its 50th anniversary – Marion was ranked among ‘the parents of modern British geography’.

Marion Newbigin was honoured with the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1924 “for her numerous contributions to geographical science, based largely on her own observations.”

“Dr Newbigin… was one of the pioneer workers who helped to raise geography from a mere school subject to one of the most important sciences bearing on human social life.”

FURTHER READING

Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850-1970 by Avril Maddrell Man and his Conquest of Nature by Marion Newbigin

No place for a lady: exploits of the female plant hunters

Fiona Valpy, novelist

It was a throwaway remark that planted the seed of inspiration for my latest novel. I was working as a volunteer at the Explorers Garden in Pitlochry, weeding among the rhododendrons and Himalayan poppies, and as I worked, I wondered out loud, “Weren’t there any female plant hunters?” The garden commemorates some of the findings of 14 famed Scottish plant hunters, such as David Douglas and George Sherriff, but there’s not a woman among them. The answer to my question is that there were, but information about them is scarce and they are historically under-acknowledged. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the heyday of the British plant hunters, it wasn’t easy for single women to travel alone, nor was it seen as appropriate for them to participate on expeditions. But this didn’t daunt passionate botanists and gardeners like Ella Christie of Cowden, who embarked on a tour of China, Hong Kong, Russia and Japan, and was so impressed by the gardens she discovered there that she created a Japanese garden of her own on her return to Dollar in Clackmannanshire.

It was often a passion for gardening that underlay such an interest in finding new plants. My own love of gardens was born out of pottering in the footsteps of my grandfather, the forester J A B Macdonald, as he worked in his woodland garden in Dumfriesshire. The impressive collection of rhododendrons and other exotic species there had been planted by his predecessor, a Miss Dickson. He wrote in an article for the WI magazine, back in the 1960s, that she was “An inveterate collector. Her most spectacular raid was in Canada and the United States. She bought an old car on landing and, as she drove through North America, filled it with plants and cuttings in sponge bags which, in spite of all obstacles, she brought home and established.” (Of course nowadays, with our greater awareness of conservation, strict protocols govern the removal of plants and seeds, and such practices have been rightly curtailed.) The Meconopsis Society records a cultivar named M grandis ‘Miss Dickson’ and notes that there is a sheet labelled M x beamishii at the British Museum, submitted by Miss A M Dickson of Dumfriesshire, so her legacy lives on. Some of the women who were skilled botanists were able to travel as appendages to their husbands. Countess Dalhousie (Christian Ramsay) was the wife of George Ramsay, Governor General of Canada and Commander in Chief of the Indian Army. She made the most of the opportunities for travel afforded her by her marriage, collecting and cataloguing plants to create meticulous herbariums which have been preserved at the Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh and Ontario. In recognition of her work, Lady Dalhousie was made an honorary member of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, and was its only female honorary member until her death in 1839. Another woman who accompanied her husband on planthunting expeditions was Betty Sherriff. The daughter of a Scottish missionary in India, Betty lived for many years

at Ascreavie House, near Kirriemuir, where she and her husband George cultivated a garden filled with their exotic discoveries. While away on their travels in the Himalaya, Betty was said to have dreamt about a new species of the famous blue poppy growing in a particular location. When her husband subsequently found the flowers growing in the place she’d described, he named the discovery Meconopsis grandis ‘Betty Sherriff’s Dream’. Betty’s voice lives on as narrator of a film called The Lost World of Tibet, an extraordinary record of their expeditions. She comments that it was “pretty tough” in places, setting out on horseback in winter to reach mountain valleys and plateaux in time for spring flowers, with three-day detours around tumbling river gorges, negotiating steep flights of rocky steps hacked into mountainsides down steep cliff faces. Betty describes being “trussed up like chickens” and hauled across rope bridges spanning wild rivers (the ropes made from woven creepers). But, she says, it was all worth it for the wonderful plants they found. Poignantly, Betty ends the film with a plea which still resonates today: “Please don’t let us ever forget the Tibetan people who have lost their world.”

“This didn’t daunt passionate botanists and gardeners like Ella Christie of Cowden.”

Travel is far easier nowadays, of course, and techniques for collecting and recording plants have evolved, but the tales of the plant hunters, both past and present, live on through their passion to catalogue the wealth of botanical beauty and fascination our world contains. Inspired by their stories, I too trekked into the Himalaya and spent time living in the Sherpa village of Phortse, researching The Sky Beneath Us. The novel is my own attempt to pay homage to those courageous women plant hunters who ignored social strictures and braved obstacles and dangers along the way, searching for beauty at the ends of the Earth.

Fiona Valpy (www.fionavalpy.com) is a bestselling author who draws inspiration from the stories of strong women. Her latest novel, The Sky Beneath Us, was published in September 2024.

Tsering Lamu and Fiona Valpy. © Richard Else

Betty Sherriff.

The Weight of Nature

Clayton Aldern (Penguin, April 2025)

Drawing on seven years of ground-breaking research, awardwinning journalist and neuroscientist Aldern documents a burgeoning public health crisis, where eco-anxiety is just the tip of the iceberg, and the rapidly changing environment is directly intervening in our brain health, behaviour, decision making and cognition in real time, affecting everything from spikes in aggravated assault to lower levels of productivity and concentration. Having met scientists and doctors unravelling the tangled connections between us and our environment, he reports the stories of those who are already feeling these shifts most keenly.

Diversity and Geography of Cultivated Plants

Edited by Karl Hammer, Miguel Esquivel, Long Chunlin (Taylor & Francis Ltd, May 2025)

This substantial book presents information on cultivated plants located within 12 different regions of the world: plants grown for food, food additives, fodder, medicine, fibre or seasoning, or as green manure crops, shade trees or hedge shrubs. With details compiled from exploration and collection missions, and ethnobotanical, archaeological and genomics studies, the book presents essayistic introductions, short data on areas of distribution and cultivation areas, the use of the plant, the history and descent of the plant, and citations of common names as a part of the cultural evolution of mankind.

Reader Offer - 20% discount

One Garden Against the World

Kate Bradbury (Bloomsbury Wildlife, June 2024)

Kate Bradbury’s new garden is busy: home to all sorts of wildlife, from red mason bees and bumblebees to house sparrows, hedgehogs and dragonflies, frogs and toads. On summer evenings, bats flit above and, for a moment, everything seems alright with the world. But she knows habitat loss remains a huge issue in gardens, the wider countryside and worldwide, and there’s the bigger threat of climate change. This is a call to action for all of us to do more for wildlife and the climate. If we work together, it’s never too late to make a difference.

Readers of The Geographer can buy One Garden Against the World in hardback for only £15.19 (RRP £18.99). To order, please visit www.bloomsbury.com and quote discount code ‘GEOGRAPHER’ at the checkout. This discount is valid on UK orders only, and cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer.

Scottish Hill Tracks

ScotWays (Scottish Mountaineering Trust, September 2024)

This handbook describes routes for walkers, cyclists, riders and runners to explore the paths, old roads and rights of way which crisscross Scotland’s hill country. This sixth edition is an essential companion for anyone with a keen interest in Scotland’s cultural heritage and for whom wide horizons, wild places and adventure beckon. It offers a fresh perspective, with full resurveys of each of the 350 hill routes and 175 variants: a rich, sprawling network through farmland and forest, moorland and coastline, bladed ridges and high plateaux, deep glaciated glens and peatlands, including many identified as Heritage Paths.

Spanish Gardens

Monty Don (author), Derry Moore (author, photographer) (BBC Books, November 2024)

Monty Don has travelled the world, using gardens and green spaces to get under the skin of our most beloved cities and countries. For this journey, richly illustrated with Derry Moore’s stunning photography, he travelled from Madrid north to the verdant gardens of Galicia, the Basque country and Barcelona, then south to the rugged tropical climes of Mallorca, Alicante, Andalucía, Malaga and Seville. He explored how Spain evolved from the dark days of the civil war to its successful transition to democracy, from the more conventional post-war gardens to the rich and inventive approaches of contemporary designers.

The Tree Atlas

Matthew Collins, Thomas Rutter (Lonely Planet, October 2024)

Whether taking in the beautiful cherry blossoms of Japan or a beech forest’s seasonal hues in France, this is the ultimate guide to discovering our planet’s most amazing species of tree, better understanding their role in our everchanging ecosystem, and appreciating the restorative effects of visiting these natural wonders. The book features 50 amazing trees from around the world, presented with exquisite photography, beautiful illustrations, key statistics, identification tips, fascinating insights into each tree’s story and what makes them so unique and special, and practical advice on how to see them in the wild.