Discovering Darwin's potato, pressing matters at the Herbarium, Cardiff flower show, beating blight (Ep 149)

Gardening with the RHS

Royal Horticultural Society

Home & Garden, Leisure, Hobbies

4.4 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week we lift the lid on the RHS Herbarium, a unique collection of dried plant material from around the world that's used by scientists, researchers and artists. We learn how and why samples are prepared for inclusion – and share the recent discovery of a very special part of the collection: a potato that was brought back from the voyage of HMS Beagle by Charles Darwin. Plus, plant pathologist Matthew Cromey shares tips with Guy Barter on how gardeners can avoid potato blight and Chris Young gets an insider's view on what visitors can expect at this year's RHS Flower Show Cardiff. For more info and useful links see www.rhs.org.uk/podcast

Transcript

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0:00.0	Get your tickets for the greatest show in Earth at an RHS garden near you.
0:05.0	Where nature puts on an unforgettable performance of colour and fragrance.
0:09.3	The scenery changes many times in one season and our finest trees will happily play the part of.
0:14.7	The best hiding place ever.
0:17.4	Booth.
0:18.2	Put your day out of dreams in the hands of the experts.
0:21.6	It's the greatest show in Earth.
0:23.7	At an RHS garden near you.
0:25.5	Book tickets online for discounts plus under fives go free and under 16 to five pounds.
0:35.9	Hello and welcome back to the RHS gardening podcast. I'm Jenny Voden, one of the
0:41.8	gardening advice team. Today we're looking to Wales and the start of the flower show season.
0:47.7	And we're taking a Darwinian approach to gardening, discussing the most blight-resistant potatoes.
1:04.0	But first, we're going to explore the wonderful WISly Herbarium to find out about the tubers that sailed on the HMS Beagle, alongside Mr Darwin himself. Our Herbarium is the UK's largest plant library dedicated to ornamental garden plants.
1:13.1	It's an invaluable resource to a vast range of horticulturists, scientists and researchers
1:18.3	and even artists. Its catalogue contained some amazing and fascinating plants with equally
1:24.5	intriguing histories. We went to meet the team to learn more about the collection
1:29.2	and the fight to preserve it for generations to come.
1:39.0	My name is Mandip Kowmotharu and I work as a herbarium digitalisation technician based here in Wesley.
1:46.2	You can say a herbarium is basically a museum but it's the museum of plants. So, you know,
1:53.8	when you were little, you'll just take pluck of lava from the garden and you place in the book
1:58.0	and, you know, after a few days you'll see a very thin fragment of that
2:01.5	and it's just basically a bigger collection. They are dried and pressed plant specimens
	...

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