London Open House - celebrating architecture, buildings

I decided to volunteer for this as I haven't volunteered for anything recently. You volunteer online and then they send you the Open House "catalogue" of places open to the public for free on that weekend. I decided to volunteer at the Brunel Museum in Rotherhythe on Saturday afternoon as I am interested in Brunel; and the Herbarium at Kew Gardens sounded really great too, (and I read about it in my "Plants from Roots to Riches" book) so signed up for Sunday morning. It was quite easy to get to the Brunel Museum on the Jubilee Line, (and you can also go on the East London line), and the Museum director, Robert, was glad to see us as he really needed the help of volunteers to man the shop/café, buy milk, take money, put the rubbish out and generally be there to talk to people. I went to Robert's talk in the morning and read all the signs and then I was pretty well-prepared to answer questions. My fellow volunteer was an interesting American who had moved from California to the locality (why?) and was looking for something to do since she had retired from research into ?finance/ markets???

It was the devil of a job to get to  Kew Gardens on Sunday morning, I went all the wrong way. There was a choice of jobs. I stood in front of the Open Weekend sign for the Tropical Nursery and tried to entice visitors to it. This is where propagation and care of the Tropical plants takes place, and of course the staff can nurse plants up to be looking fabulous and then pop them into the display in the public greenhouses. Unfortunately it is placed right in front of the small children's play area so most of the people there were concerned with toilets/nappy change and the café rather than seeing the botanical care going on. I was lucky to be standing with a horticulturalist called Lorraine who worked in the Tropical Nursery and specialised in cacti and succulents. I asked her all sorts of questions about the plants and what she does all day! It was lucky she was so nice because I was standing there for a long time. In the end I didn't get to see the herbarium at all, and it is only open once a year. I hope it is open next year, and I will definitely go. I did walk around Kew in the afternoon, (free entry for volunteers) and I will post about what I saw.

There are quite a few attractions at Kew for children; it has changed in that respect. There is a sculpture exhibition at the moment - brilliant for the older ones.

Seed experiments (Weeds by Richard Mabey)

On 1 May 1945, Professor Edward Salisbury, the director of Kew Gardens at that time, gave a talk on weed varieties that had grown on London's bomb sites.

"... how a whole new ecosystem had taken root in the city's open wounds. It was a story coloured not just by wartime drama but by the evocative names and addresses of the vegetable phoenixes..."

"Bracken carpeted the nave of St James' in Piccadilly... Oxford ragwort - an eighteenth century immigrant from the slopes of Mount Etna - had graffitised the rubble of London's Wall.... Gallant-soldier (from Peru) ... appeared on one in eight of the bomb sites, and the purple surf of rosebay willowherb - already christened bombweed by Londoners - across almost all of them. ...creeping buttercup, chickweed, nettle, dock, groundsel, plantains, knotgrass.. . Prof Salisbury logged a total of 126 species in all. It was a weed storm, a reminder, if anybody needed one, of how thinly the veneer of civilisation lay over the wilderness."

Actual name: Guascas, or Galinsoga (not gallant soldier) Galinsoga is named after the mid-eighteenth century the Spanish botanist and physician Ignacio Mariano Martínez Galinsoga and the English name ‘Gallant Soldier’ is simply a corruption of this name. Other English names for the plant include Gallant Soldiers, Soldiers of the Queen, Littleflower quickweed, Quickweed and Potato weed. ‘Parviflora‘ simply means that the flowers are small.

More interesting info here

[Earlier in his life] Edward Salisbury had read the works of Charles Darwin, and found that the great biologist's curiosity and unconventional experimental methods chimed with this own. Darwin was fascinated by weeds ... and tested the effects of saltwater on germination. He wondered if seeds might travel in the stomachs of dead birds, and sprouted seeds he had extracted from the dung of migratory locusts. He raised more than eighty plants from the mud-ball gathered round a wounded partridge's leg. ... Darwin cleared and dug a plot three feet long by two feet wide, and simply observed what plant life spontaneously emerged: "I marked all the seedlings of our native weeds as they came up, and out of 357 no less than 295 were destroyed, chiefly by slugs and insects. "

"Salisbury's own experiments were very much in the Darwinian mould. ... he tested the airborne dispersal of plants such as thistle and dandelion... he went through animal dung and bird droppings to see what seeds were carried in them and tested to see if they were still fertile.

"He even regarded himself as a potential carrier, and famously raised 300 plants of over twenty weed species from the debris in his trouser turn-ups ... He repeated the experiment with the mud scraped from his shoes, and found that "one quite commonly conveys at least six propagules in such a manner."

Petition to stop funding cuts to Kew Gardens

The government wants to cut funds to Kew Gardens. This would stop some important projects. The petition has been running for about 6 weeks  and has 75,000 signatures, but they need 200,000 to make a difference. Please have a look at the petition at Change.org and sign if you agree that cutting funding there would be a false economy.


look at the petition here