News
Vida Svahnström MSc at Kew
Vida Svahnström, an MPG member since 2018, will be studying for an MSc at RBG Kew from autumn this year. Vida was awarded a bursary by MPG to go on the field trip to the Peloponnese in March 2019, led by John Fielding. At that time she was a student at the University of St Andrews but graduated this month with a first class degree in evolutionary biology. Her postgraduate studies will be on plant and fungal taxonomy, diversity and conservation.
New website
We are pleased to announce that our new website is now up and running, providing a fresh new look using a more modern approach that will make the site more adaptable to use on different sorts of devices. This will not only help members and those interested in our society, it will also improve our ranking with search engines, which downgrade sites in their search results if they are not dynamically adaptable to use on PC, tablet or mobile phone.
The Abbey Garden, Tresco
We had an excellent members’ Zoom meeting followed by a very interesting talk by Mike Nelhams, head gardener at The Abbey Garden, Tresco. If you missed the talk, you can catch up now. Mike also mentions his seed list from the garden.
Winter Meeting 2020
We had a full house at our Winter Meeting at RHS Wisley this year. Our speaker was John David, head of horticultural taxonomy at the RHS, whose talk was entitled ‘To Spain for daffodils’. It covered details of his research trips to study daffodils through a transect of the country from north to south, covering most of the 25 species found in Spain. Pictured here is Narcissus papyraceus. A recording of the lecture with video of the slides is now available. View the full list of the plants that John references.
From the Bursary Committee
With our tours and events on hold for the moment, we are not able to award bursaries for people to travel with us. However, we are keen to hear from anyone who has a project connected with Mediterranean plants or gardens and will consider applications to support an educational, conservation or research objective. Applications are particularly welcome from young horticulturists who wish to widen their knowledge and experience of Mediterranean plants and dry gardens. At the beginning of 2020, a bursary was awarded to Catherine Cutler which enabled her to join the trip to Israel led by Oron Peri in February. Catherine works in the Mediterranean Biome at the Eden Project and was keen to see the natural growing conditions of some of the bulbs and other plants that they cultivate in the Biome. View the reports from bursary recipients.
Proposed plant study days
We hope before long to be organising Mediterranean-plant study days, in line with recent ideas on having more educational activities. Apart from the Salvia day now postponed to 2021, members have suggested the genus Narcissus and the Mediterranean elements of the family Araceae: Arum, Biarum, Dracunculus, etc, also perhaps Iris, Callistemom, Cistus or Lavandula.