Friends' News Feb 2013

Nerine sarniensis by Juliet Day

Friends’ News Clippings & Cuttings Alex Summers

With horticulture at the heart of the Garden (and many of this year’s What's On courses), we’re promoting an expanded Clippings & Cuttings to the front cover of this first Friends' News of 2013. We look back at the autumn/winter work programme and forward to highlight some exciting developments coming up...

In the Glasshouse Range, the carnivorous display is making way for an exciting new waterlily house. New raised pools are being built in order to show off the Santa Cruz waterlily, Victoria cruziana, one of the rapidly-growing tropical lily species from the waterways of Argentina and Paraguay. The huge lily pads of Victoria cruziana take just 90 days from germination to the first giant leaf unfurling, so the Glasshouse team and colleagues are having to work quickly to get the new pools ready in time! The leaves have a distinctive upturned, crimped edge, up to six centimetres in depth, with a couple of notches let in to allow rainwater to drain out.

This species was the inspiration for the Fountain that heads the Main Walk. The seed has been kindly donated by Helsinki Botanic Garden and will be started off in polythene bags of water kept at 29°C. How to transport the enormous and fragile leaves, fearsomely barbed, into the

finished pools from behind the scenes will be quite a challenge! The team are also busy propagating a wide range of colourful, rampant lianes, including some new and beautiful passionflowers, to quickly clothe the interior and set a suitably tropical scene, as well as some tropical Nymphaea species with shockingly bright blue and pink flowers to float alongside the Victoria cruziana.

Continuing the theme of trialling outside the hardier relatives of species grown under glass, Demonstration & Display will too be constructing a raised pool in the adjacent bay in which to grow the annual waterlily, Euryale ferox, native to Eastern Asia, which also sports giant, and as the name suggests, prickly lilypads.

'We hope to complete the waterlily house by Easter, but we’ll keep you updated with progress on the website and via the Friends’ e-news.

Alex Summers

The Santa Cruz waterlily, Victoria cruziana, growing at Longwood Gardens in the US.

Cross section of the raised pool design.

Clippings & Cuttings continues on centre spread.../ Friends’ News – Issue 91 – February 2013

Welcome 2012 proved to be an interesting and often challenging year in the Garden. A big thank you to the staff and our many volunteers, who all helped to make it also a successful one.

A new Director for the Garden

There were many horticultural highlights, perhaps the most popular being the annual flower meadows created to celebrate both the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London 2012 Olympic Games. But, the flowering sensation in 2012 was the first blooming for us of the Chinese tree, Emmenopterys henryi, to which the common name of ‘Man Yang tree’ was given. I am not so sure we will be able to repeat this flowering in 2013 but the event clearly illustrated the way plants and gardens are always able to surprise us.

Our congratulations go to Stanton Williams Architects and the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University for winning the prestigious Stirling Prize for architecture in November. Several projects currently in train will bring to a close the reinstatement works associated with the Laboratory. Chief amongst these will be a more permanent landscape planting around the Station Road Gate, renovation of the boundary planting, and installation of improved railings along this spur adjacent to the new Botanic House and relocated war memorial. The refurbishment of 90 Hills Road, the office block immediately on our northern boundary, is due to finish early in the year, bringing building work to an end in this area and allowing us to continue with the rejuvenation of this important gateway to the Garden and the city of Cambridge.

This time last year we were concerned about the continuing low rainfall, which was well below average. We needn’t have worried as 2012 turned out to be by far the wettest on record. This of course brought different problems to the Garden – excess weed growth and continuous mowing, and a rare sight for us – waterlogged ground. These contrasting weather years graphically illustrate how extreme weather conditions are becoming more frequent, posing new challenges in managing the Garden. It is with some trepidation we look to see what the weather throws at us in 2013!

Last year, we welcomed many new members of staff to the Garden and recruiting to vacant and new posts dominated workloads for many. This does mean we can look forward to 2013 with a near full complement of staff, essential for sustaining our diverse activities. In the new year, we will welcome Nicci Steele-Williams as Head of Visitor Services, Felicity Plent as Head of Education, and Wendy Godfrey as Deputy Administrator. I am also pleased to say that the post of Director of the Botanic Garden has now been accepted by Dr Beverley Glover from the University's Department of Plant Sciences. We look forward to welcoming her to the Garden.

Dr Tim Upson, Curator and Acting Director

We greatly look forward to welcoming Dr Beverley Glover as Director of the Botanic Garden. Dr Glover will take up the post, and the associated Professorship of Plant Systematics and Evolution to which she has been elected, in early summer 2013.

Dr Glover, currently Reader in Evolution and Development at the University’s Department of Plant Sciences, said: “It is a great privilege and honour to be asked to lead its continued development. I am very much looking forward to working with the Garden's highly-skilled and dedicated staff to develop further the collections and to ensure they play their full part in botanical research and teaching, both in the University and worldwide.”

Dr Glover read Plant and Environmental Biology at St Andrews before completing her PhD at the John Innes Centre in the molecular genetics of cellular differentiation in the plant epidermis. She came to Cambridge first as a Junior Research Fellow at Queens' College, before progressing from Lecturer to Reader in the Department of Plant Sciences. A Fellow of the Linnean Society, she was awarded the Linnean Society Bicentennial Medal in 2010 and she received the William Bate Hardy prize from the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 2011.

Welcoming Ann Gray to the Garden and to Thresholds Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has invited ten of the best UK poets writing today to take part in an unprecedented series of residencies at the University of Cambridge, supported by Arts Council England. The Thresholds project has matched poet Ann Gray with the Botanic Garden.

Over the next few months, Ann will be working on a poem inspired by the Garden's collections to contribute to a Thresholds Anthology, and also developing and leading Friends’ News – Issue 91 – February 2013

creative writing workshops with students from the Red Balloon Centre. Using the plants and their stories of discovery, transport and introduction as inspiration, the children will produce their own work that we hope to exhibit in the Garden.

Ann Gray grew up in Cambridge and was educated at the Perse School before going on to nursing training at St Barts. She now lives and works in Cornwall where she has a care home for people with dementia, in

a three-acre setting of therapeutic gardens and orchards. Ann will give a public reading from her Cambridgebased volume, At the Gate, in March, date and time to be confirmed. Please check the Garden’s website for details, and for more on Thresholds visit www.thresholds.org.uk

Clive Nichols

Emmenopterys henryi – a September sensation

The extended bracts were distinctive features of the scented inflorescences In the last Friends’ News we wrote with excitement of the imminent flowering of the Chinese tree Emmenopterys henryi, for the first time in Cambridge. It proved to be only the fifth flowering in the UK since its introduction over 100 years ago, with the first recorded being a sparse show at Wakehurst Place in 1987. Our tree sported prolific blooms that covered the top of the tree from the end of August to the first frosts.

This unusual flowering caught the imagination of many including the media, even reaching the news pages of the BBC website. This encouraged many visitors to come and see the tree but also catalysed some contacts we never expected. We first heard from Stephanie Henry, the great-grand niece of Augustine Henry, the Irish plant hunter who discovered the tree and after whom it was named, who came up to see it in flower for the first time.

Local botanical artist, Georita Harriott, had already started painting the tree for publication in the prestigious Curtis’s Botanical Magazine when we heard from another artist, Caroline Frances-King. She had previously travelled on a scholarship to China in hope of painting the tree in the wild, but bureaucratic delays meant the trees had finished flowering by the time travel permits came through.

So news that a tree was in flower,

comparatively speaking just down the road from her home in Bath, gave the perfect opportunity for Caroline to complete her project to illustrate Chinese plants discovered

by Henry.

An e-mail from Charlie Erskine, previously Head of the Arboretum at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, asked about the origin of our tree. We knew it had come from Kew back in 1982, but the significance of his enquiry soon became clear – Charlie had been involved in the micropropagation of one of the original trees introduced by the plant hunter Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson in 1907, which was in decline.

Micropropagation is a technique that involves taking a small amount of tissue and culturing it in sterile conditions on a gel. Plant hormones are used to encourage the tissue to differentiate into roots and stems and eventually to form a new plant. It’s a technique useful for difficult species and when limited material is available. Significantly for us, this was one of the first times it had been used for a hardy, woody tree species and it is now highly likely that our plant, supplied from Kew, is one of these micropropagated trees and hence a descendant of an original Wilson tree. Given that much of the area where Wilson originally collected seed has been deforested, this cultivated material is of significance, possibly representing genetic stock that has been lost.

With Emmenopterys henryi a decided

mouthful and no common name in use (since the tree is so rare and flowering even more so), our local paper, The Cambridge News, was inspired to ask their readers to come up with a suitable name and they didn’t disappoint.

From the entries we liked ‘expecto floresco’ which appealed to Harry Potter fans on the staff, but the winner was ‘Man Yang tree’. This was suggested by Peter Phillips, aged 12 and coincidentally also from Bath, whose greatgreat-great uncle was Augustine Henry. Plant hunting in China was not easy at the time and much use was made of local guides to help collect material. Henry’s favourite and most successful collector was called Man Yang, so Peter suggested that it would be appropriate that the common name should commemorate him. You may wonder how common names become accepted. There are no rules or committees to decide; they become adopted through use so we shall see if any others pick up on this suggestion.

Those who visited the tree may have smelt the sweet scent of the flowers. It certainly attracted a wide range of visiting insects from bees to many red admiral butterflies. The white colour and sweet fragrance suggest a night pollinator in the wild, perhaps moths. We did try to pollinate the flowers artificially using a paint brush but no fruits have formed, so it looks as though our efforts were unsuccessful.

So can we expect flowers in 2013? Do keep a watch for buds next August, but I suspect not.

Flowering is not down to the age of the tree – ours is just 30 years old and many of the original plantings now over 100 years are yet to bloom. The most likely explanation lies back in 2011 with the prolonged hot weather and drought conditions, followed by the sharp winter frosts. It’s likely the tree needs both a period of hot dry summer weather and a cold winter to initiate flowering, so if this theory is correct, the cool wet summer of 2012 would have put paid to this.

Dr Tim Upson, Curator and Acting Director

A fond farewell to Judy Fox Some of you will know that at the end of November 2012, Judy Fox, our Schools Officer, retired from the Garden. Under her stewardship since 2006, the schools’ programme has grown to include visits from 9,000 school children annually, and a major part of Judy’s contribution to the Garden has been the concept and development of the Schools’ Garden, which we plan to open formally to all garden visitors later this year.

Judy also began and ran our Gardening Club – the photo shows Judy surrounded by the children at the last session she ran in the autumn.

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish Judy a happy and no doubt extremely busy retirement, and to thank her for introducing plants, gardening and a love of the natural world to so many of our young visitors - she and I often agreed on the pertinence of Gertrude Jekyll’s words: ‘A love of gardening is a seed sown once that never dies’. We will miss her terribly (although she hasn’t ruled out a spot of volunteering), and expect the recruitment of a new Schools Officer to take place in the next couple of months.

Felicity Plent, Head of Education Friends’ News – Issue 91 – February 2013

Horticulture Clippings and Cuttings... Continued from front page

Juliet Day

Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii.

G The doline, a water-worn, collapsed cave

feature of Balkan limestone country, has been re-opened at the centre of the Rock Garden, following planting reinstatement. A new bench with a plaque thanking all those Friends who generously donated to the Limestone Rock Garden 50th Anniversary Plan has been positioned at its heart, not only to provide a new unique resting spot which will be bathed in perfume when the Indian bean tree, Catalpa erubescens ‘Purpurea’, overhead is in full flower, but also to deter young climbers from scaling the rocky walls and damaging the plant collections.

Friends’ News – Issue 91 – February 2013

G Building on the popularity of the annual

it will be very rewarding to see how this flower meadows of 2012, we are delighted experiment in growing a global perennial that James Hitchmough, Professor of meadow develops, both from the visual and Horticultural Ecology at the University of horticultural point of view.

Sheffield and the plant architect coG Alpine and Woodland have embarked upon responsible with Nigel Dunnett for the a two-year remedial project along the globally acclaimed wildflower meadows at Stream Garden. All plants along the length of the Olympic Park, has developed a new the south bank have been lifted, taken drought-tolerant perennial meadow behind the scenes, split and propagated. The planting for the semi-circular bed just to the south bank has been dug over and cleaned east of Cory Lodge. The overall concept uses but will be left fallow for at least twelve a low layer of mostly winter evergreen or months to ensure that the last traces of semi-evergreen herbaceous plants to make a ground elder and enchanterer’s nightshade multispecies tapestry, punctuated by grassy have been exterminated. Closeby, the team tall forms, stem species and flowering have also cut right back the hulms of emergents, all highlighted against the dark bamboo hit harshly by the severe frosts of green of the yew hedge.

February 2012 – they look to be recovering well. Several clumps of bamboo with expansionist tendencies have (hopefully) been restrained by the installation of encircling rhizome barriers.

Juliet Day

Juliet Day

middle of a busy junction to our eastern boundary, we are keen to exploit the opportunity to improve and replant.

Running south from the ticket office here, new herbaceous planting will take a purple and gold theme, featuring Salvia ‘Mainacht’ and lots of long-season performers in the daisy family, Compositae, including Helenium ‘Wyndley’, Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii, mixed with grasses including Calamagrostis and Miscanthus species. The herbaceous planting will peter out into a bulb layer as it feathers with the wooded boundary, currently being thinned by Trees & Shrubs to show off the mature beech, oak and hornbeam to better effect. All along this boundary, we are developing with Dr Nancy Harrison, an ornithologist with Anglia Ruskin University, a ‘best practice’ planting to encourage birdlife. The mix will include both native and exotic species to host a rich and diverse invertebrate life – a plentiful supply of insects and other invertebrates is crucial for parent birds sourcing food for their young and directly improves fledging success. The planting will be well-layered and dense to encourage nesting. It will feature birches, maples and Japanese cherries that will also provide plenty of interest for the eye. As the planting swings round to the northern boundary, a shrubby layer will be woven in to extend the colour and interest of the Autumn Garden.

Howard Rice

G With the war memorial moving from the

Dianthus carthusianorum (left) and Berkheya purpurea 'Zulu Warrior' will be grown from seed.

The plants are all drought tolerant, with a long flowering season from April to October.

There’s a strong emphasis on Mediterranean and steppe environments from the Colorado plateau through to central Europe and Asia, but with species also drawn from the dryer parts of the North American prairies and the summer rainfall regions of South Africa. The Demonstration & Display team have already laid a 7.5cm layer of sand – that’s 60 tonnes all shifted and spread by tractor and spade – to create a sterile barrier that prevents weed seed germinating to infiltrate and outcompete the germinating meadow, and that also acts as a perfectly free-draining seed bed. The plants and plugs – foxtail lilies, Eremurus, and Galtonia feature in number – will be very carefully planted through the sand barrier, but the bulk of the meadow will be grown from perennial seed, hand mixed

by James into nuanced combinations to suit the varying shaded and exposed conditions that even this quite modest-sized site affords. Recognising our research roots and commitment to horticultural experimentation, James has recommended some challenging and seldom-seen plants, including the Indian paintbrush, Castilleja integra, for example. Sowing should be complete by the end of January as some species need a period of stratification in the ground to prompt germination. While we won’t have the instant flowering gratification of an annual meadow to enjoy this summer,

G Landscape and Machinery are on the point

of completing re-laying the crazy-paving path to the Bog Garden and over into the Woodland. They will be returning to phase two, replacing the steps up to the sandstone part of the Rock Garden with a new path, next winter, but over the coming months, the team will be improving the drainage, structure and topdressing of the gravel paths particularly in the western part of the Garden, which have struggled in the wet 2012, so do please look out for and bear with any closed paths and diversions.

G On Systematics, various beds in the central

oval are being re-dug, before being moved around to reflect contemporary classifications more closely. Several other beds are also being re-jigged and some will remain fallow to control some perennial weeds. We will be continuing with the knotty problem of sorting and separating out the Japanese knotweeds on the Polygonaceae beds. We hope also to augment the plantings selected to illustrate the Chemicals from Plants Trail.

Horticulture 2012: the wettest year since records began, but the visitors were undeterred...

Lucy Rowley

The Garden ended the year with a record 812.7mm of rain in 2012. This is all the more remarkable when reminded that the first quarter of the year in fact ran below average. Here, John ‘The Weatherman’ Kapor recaps the meteorological year.

Although the 3rd May logged 22.3mm, the month ended dry, with the 25th and 26th enjoying back-to-back cloudless skies. A maximum of 26.9°C was reached on both the 27th and 28th, but there was a cool night on the 7th with -3.0°C on the grass.

June 2012 was a wet month in Cambridge, with the 10th collecting 21.5mm. The 28th reached 28.1°C but in contrast we had a ground frost of -0.5°C on the 13th.

Clitocybe nebularis: 2012's wet weather made it a great year for fungi.

This time last year, January 2012 recorded reasonable rainfall. The temperatures ricocheted about with six air frosts but double figures were also reached on 12 days. From the 29th, an icy flow brought temperatures down to a more seasonal 3.4°C on the 30th.

Up until St Valentine's Day, the Garden was in winter’s icy grip with 14cm of snow falling on the evening of the 4th, topped by another 3cm on the 9th. There were two very sharp frosts on the 12th and 13th with the air temperature plummeting to -13.6°C overnight on the 12th. Many plants were unprepared by the previous mild weather, and the frosts damaged several Daphne bholua in the Winter Garden. The thaw set in mid-month, reaching 17.4°C on the 23rd.

Precipitation was below average.

March 2012 was a dry month. After the 7th, only 2.3mm of rain fell in the remaining 24 days, making for very good hoeing conditions. The lowest of three slight air frosts came on the 19th, -1.3°C, so not low enough to spoil the Magnolia flowers. There were 20 ground frosts, but high pressure also brought some warm, sunny days with 21.3°C reached on the 28th.

Up until the 20th of April, there were a lot of wet days with no rain, as farmers say. But just as hosepipe bans were announced, heavy rain set in - there were five days with hail and another three with thunder. With 23.8mm falling on the 28th, April fetched up a very wet month, receiving over 100mm more than April 2011.

July was the wettest month of the year bringing 130.3mm of rain, making it three out of seven months logging over 100mm in 2012, an exceptional concentration of big rainfall months. 28.8°C was reached on the 24th.

Up to the 25th, August was a much dryer month with the warmest day of the year falling on 19th at 31.3°C. Then on the 25th, Cambridge caught an intense storm with hail and thunder that lasted three and a half hours and brought 49.4mm of rain. This caused local flooding in the City and indeed the tide marks of debris washed about could be seen all over the Garden. This brought the August total to 76.1mm, and pushed the year-to-date running total past the total rainfall for 2011. On the upside, the rain promoted some good growth on plants, particularly on some of the trees, and the lawns stayed green all through the summer.

September was on the dry side with the greatest soak of 14.8mm coming on the 23rd. 28.5°C was reached on the 9th and the month stayed warm until the 11th: thereafter we saw three touches of ground frost.

October was again wet with the 4th seeing 14.7mm. The month started mild with 18.3°C on the 1st, but gave way to a northerly flow of wintry showers with hail early on the 27th.

There was one slight air frost of -0.4°C and 10 slight ground frosts. The rain may have dampened the autumn colour displays, but did set perfect conditions for a great show of fungi.

It rained on over half the days of November, with 12.7mm clocked on the 4th.

Temperatures were unsettled with 15.9°C on the 13th contrasting with just 4.4°C on the 30th. There were 14 ground frosts with the lowest at -7.4°C falling on the last day of the month.

December started cold with a sprinkling of snow on the 5th. Then on the 12th we awoke to the most stunning wintry scene for several years: the sun came out after freezing fog had coated the trees with a thick hoar frost to turn the Garden silver. Milder weather soon returned. We went through the 800mm of annual rain on Christmas Day and the total for the year eventually reached 812.7mm, the wettest since our records began in 1899 and more than double last year’s total of 380.4mm.

Wonderfully, our visitors, and chief amongst them the Friends, were undeterred by the soggy weather and we recorded just a shade under 200,000 visits in 2012. Thank you for your continued support, whatever the weather!

Years since 1899 with over 700 mm 2012 1903 1958 1924 1960 1950 2001 2000

813 776 737 728 724 720 706 704

Rainfall comparison 2011/2012 Rainfall in mm

Friends’ News – Issue 91 – February 2013

Horticulture Who’s Who in the Garden: Alex Summers, Glasshouse Supervisor

The Range has been a central part of the Garden since its initial construction in 1891. It has changed considerably over this time, both internally and externally, and a great overview of this is provided in the September 2011 Friends’ News. As with the structure and the plants, over the years Supervisors have come and gone, and I am the latest in a line of frost tender horticulturists to lead this section.

I have been driven by a keen interest in natural history for as long as I can remember. As a child my time was spent in my parents’ garden

In 2011, as my time at Kew ended, an opportunity to work for a year at Longwood Gardens in the USA presented itself. Naturally I packed my bags and moved shop. Longwood is a display garden and this provided an alternative insight into horticulture and garden management. I have now come full circle with my return to the Garden here in September 2012, and look forward to continuing to develop the Glasshouse Range and its collections.

As a plant obsessive, a familiar condition amongst horticulturists, the Glasshouses provide the perfect outlet for my passion.

The opportunity to grow even just a snippet of the vast diversity of the plant kingdom from a variety of ecosystems is – cue cliché – a dream come true. Having had the opportunity to visit some truly extraordinary wild places, I am keen to ensure that the Range at CUBG plays a full role in promoting the conservation of these threatened habitats for generations to come.

Following graduation I completed the National Certificate in Horticulture while working for a small rights-of-way contractor in the Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire countryside. My big-break came when I was awarded a place on the traineeship at, none other than, CUBG. After a fantastic year at the Garden I moved on to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to undertake the Kew Diploma, a three- year apprenticeship that covers all aspects of botanical horticulture.

Juliet Day

In praise of the Persian ironwood

Juliet Day

Alex Summers botanising on Ben Nevis.

and the surrounding Nottinghamshire countryside generally aggravating the local fauna and flora. Pond dipping, wildlife watching and growing anything and everything offered were familiar pursuits.

Zoology was the natural choice to read at university but as the three years came to a close, I honed in on three realities to focus my career path: it had to involve plants, have its roots in conservation, and, most importantly, it had to be applied! Having been raised around botanical horticulture the decision was not difficult.

Flowers appear in winter.

The lattice of grafted branches of our Parrotia persica.

Winter is a great time to appreciate the Garden’s trees from a different perspective, as the bare branches reveal the intricate branching and structure. One of the most rewarding to seek out is the Persian ironwood, Parrotia persica, in the witch hazel (Hamamelidaceae) family. Our best specimen is perched on the western edge of the Humphrey Gilbert Carter area, close to the Forsythia collection: it has made a low spreading tree that stretches out over the Henslow Walk towards the Systematics Beds.

Although well known for its colourful autumn leaves, this tree really comes into its own in winter. Look out for the flowers – the buds were swelling with the mild weather in late December – but don’t expect large spectacular petals as the beauty of this tree is far more subtle. The dark brown, rounded Friends’ News – Issue 91 – February 2013

buds burst open to reveal a showy bunch of crimson stamens, the male part of the flower.

The actual petals are small and insignificant.

Although you may have to duck and weave around the low branches over the path, this positioning does afford excellent close-ups of the flowers spread along the branches. They look most wonderful after snow when the red flowers are shrouded in pristine white.

But this tree has yet more to offer as the bark of the trunk and main laterals peels into small plates, creating a magical patchwork of greys, browns and greens, and then there is still more... Glance up into the canopy you will see a maze of criss-crossing branches. Where some meet, the branches have fused or grafted together, a natural phenomenon that can occur in a wide range of different trees.

Our specimen just seems to be very unusual

in this respect as I know of no other ironwoods with such a pronounced latticework, the result of a great profusion of grafts. If you look closely you can see branches which are beginning to rub together and the scarring that indicates the start of this process.

Eventually the active growing region of the branches, the cambium, which is situated just under the bark, is exposed and the two touching branches knit together.

Parrotia persica, as the name suggests, is a native of the Caucasus and Northern Iran. The low spreading trees most often seen in cultivation (of which our tree is typical in this regard) are quite unlike the upright trees found in wild woods (as in the wild-collected younger specimen just to the left and behind our main tree). It would seem that the early introductions into cultivation of the Persian ironwood were of a clone with a spreading habit, but what may now seem typical to us is actually unrepresentative of the trees in the wild.

Dr Tim Upson, Curator and Acting Director

Education New year, new garden? and inspirational ideas for creating a garden with your family in mind – do bring along pictures of your own gardens for help with specific design problems. Dawn is an RHS Chelsea medal-winning designer, a gardening journalist for the Guardian, Telegraph, The Garden, blogs on her own Little Green Fingers site, and is the horticultural adviser for the CBeebies show, Mr Bloom's Nursery. Dawn’s first book, Garden Crafts for Children, was published in February 2012.

Dawn Isaac's family-friendly garden.

If your new year's resolutions include spending more time on your garden, why not join one of our courses designed to help you do just that.

Coming up in March is our new ‘Learn to Garden Weekend’. I’ll be assisting our Head of Horticulture, Sally Petitt with this two-day introduction to gardening. Each day consists of two classroom sessions and two practical sessions out in the Garden or in our behindthe-scenes horticultural facilities. We’ll cover how to assess your garden, prepare areas for planting, choose appropriate plants and get them to flourish. By the end of the weekend, you’ll be brimming with confidence and enthusiasm for tackling your own patch.

In April, garden design expert Dawn Isaac joins us to run a Family Garden Design Clinic. This one-day session will be packed with practical

In June we welcome author and journalist Jackie Bennett to run a one-day course on creating a wildlife friendly garden. She’ll be looking at different types of habitat creation using examples from here in the Garden and will help you work through specific ideas for your own garden. Jackie has authored two wildlife gardening books and writes for many publications including The English Garden – see her lovely piece on our Winter Garden in the December 2012 issue. She is also Editor of the Garden Design Journal.

We hope you’ll find something in our course programme to help you keep your gardening resolutions this year, whether it is starting from scratch, learning new horticultural or identification techniques or growing your own cut flowers or meadow for the first time. Full details of all our gardening and plant identification courses are available on the website, or pick up a copy of the What’s On brochure at the Garden on your next visit.

Felicity Plent, Head of Education

Flat-pack nests We were very sorry not to be able to run our first Saturday family event of the year, so here instead are instructions for making your own flat-pack nest kits at home. According to the RSPB, birds actually only spend a few days each year building nests, but in their effort to collect all the various materials they need, they can fly hundreds of miles!

Start by collecting a pile of suitable nesting material: good things include dried grasses, small bundles of fine twigs, moss, animal fur, and feathers – the RSPB estimate that longtailed tits can use up to 2,000 feathers in each nest! Collect up unravelled garden twine, wool, raffia, and even the contents of your hairbrush or dog basket.

Next make a frame. This one was made of rush woven together, but you could use thin willow, hazel or cornus stems, a piece of chicken wire, or recycle an old empty hanging basket.

Stuff the frame with bundles of the different nesting materials and in March hang it up in the garden. You’ll soon see a steady flow of feathered visitors popping to their very own building supplies centre. If the weather is dry make sure there is a wet muddy patch in your garden somewhere too, for those birds that prefer ‘cement’ style methods.

Last year I made these with my own children and we included some lengths of wool in our kits. My daughter was so excited to see pieces of pink wool woven into one of the nests in the garden when the leaves fell in the winter.

For more details on bird nesting habits see http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/ features/homesweethome.aspx

Felicity Plent, Head of Education

First Saturday Family Fun No need to book, just drop-in anytime between 11am – 3pm on the first Saturday of every month for plant-inspired fun. £3 per child, plus normal Garden admission for accompanying adults.

Plant People Saturday 2 February Create giant plant people using printing, sponge painting and collage.

Seeds and Rubbish Saturday 2 March We’ll be giving plants new homes by growing seeds in recycled containers.

Easter Secrets Saturday 6 April Can you solve the clues to find the secret places in the Garden? Collect a prize and make an Easter mosaic.

Crowning glory Saturday 4 May Come and make a flower crown and have your picture taken sitting on our Garden throne.

For the half-term & Easter holidays...

Crafty Gardens workshops Monday 11 February, 10.30-12 noon and again at 1.30pm-3pm Join Dawn Isaac, family garden expert, for a garden crafts session making beautiful tea-light candle holders and bird feeders. £5 per child per session (6+ years), parents/carers to stay. Normal Garden admission applies.

Pre-booking essential on 01223 331875 or education@botanic.cam.ac.uk Twilight: Deep Dark Story Safari Wednesday 13 February, 4.30-7.30pm As darkness falls, the fun begins. Come and explore our illuminated Glasshouse Range where storytellers will tell tales of the night. Bring your torch! Café open.

Free, Brookside Gate only for admission and exit.

Easter Secrets Friday 5 and Saturday 6 April Can you solve the clues to find the secret places in the Garden? Collect a prize and make an Easter mosaic.

Drop-in, £3 per child, parents/carers to stay. Normal Garden admission applies.

Friends’ News – Issue 91 – February 2013

Dear Friend Happy New Year and we look forward to welcoming you to the Garden over the coming months. Could I begin with a plea to all Botanic Garden Friends to add to your list of new year's resolutions remembering to bring and show your membership cards at the ticket offices when you visit. We are delighted that so many are keen to support the work of the Garden, and we now have around 5,000 active Friends. With ever busier gates, please could I also ask that you help our visitor service team do their work, and wait patiently if there are queues during busy times – it is important that the visitor service staff are able to check your membership cards both for security and for data logging.

During October our Volunteer Guides provided new tours for Friends featuring small and medium-sized trees of the Botanic Garden. Compiling a new Garden tour is a long and complicated task and we are very grateful to guides Elizabeth Rushden and Gail Jenner who undertook the challenge so successfully. Other new tours are in the pipeline and details will appear in future editions of Friends’ News.

We are delighted to be able to offer new Sunday afternoon tours this year during May, June and July. They will take place every Sunday starting from Brookside Gate at 3pm and last one hour. The tours cost £3 per person plus normal garden admission for non-Friends.

Friends’ Events I would like to convey the gratitude of Garden staff to all our volunteer Guides for their commitment and enthusiasm during 2012. Between them they have provided 87 tours for over 1,400 visitors.

Feedback indicates that all were planning a return visit and all would recommend a guided tour to others.

I do hope many of you will be able to join the tours and trips detailed right and in the enclosures. Please note that the Friends’ residential trip to Cornwall in May 2013 is fully booked - thank you to Margaret Goddin for organising this very popular trip.

The bi-monthly Friends’ e-news, written by Development Officer, Juliet Day, which describes the plants and landscapes at their best, is extremely popular and now has nearly 2,000 subscribers, a 100% increase since January 2011. We see many Friends bringing print-outs on visits to help locate particular plants of interest in hidden parts of the Garden. If you would like to sign up for the e-news please e-mail friends@botanic.cam.ac.uk quoting your current Friends membership number.

With best wishes to all our Friends.

Emma Daintrey, Outreach Administrator 01223 331875 friends@botanic.cam.ac.uk

Support for Voicing the Garden We are delighted to announce a £9,800 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to support Voicing the Garden, an oral history project designed to gather up and share the stories of the people behind the plants – those who have helped create the collections, gardens and landscapes and also our visitors, whose support and expectations have influenced its past and continue to shape its future.

We celebrated some significant birthdays last year including 30 years of the Friends, and 60 years of our ‘staying in touch’ organisation for former members of staff.

And when Al Langley, Assistant Glasshouse Supervisor, brought in a 1953 cine film of fun and games at the Garden, our determination to capture these stories, share them and get a conversation going was redoubled. As part of the project, the film has now been digitised and overlaid with the recollections of Peter Thoday, who trained here at the Garden before Friends’ News – Issue 91 – February 2013

embarking on a prestigious career in horticulture that has seen him lecture, advise the Eden Project and present television series for the BBC. The film can now be seen on the new Voicing the Garden project pages of the website at www.botanic.cam.ac.uk Volunteers will play a crucial role in uncovering, researching, recording, transcribing and publishing the stories; all will receive specialist training. If you would like to help and perhaps acquire some new skills and friends along the way, please come along to the project presentation morning on Friday 22 February. And on Saturday 18 May at our new Festival of Plants, we will be on a major drive, with the help of BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, to collect and record your stories for Voicing the Garden as Friends and visitors, so do please put the date in your diary and come along and share your thoughts and memories of the Garden with us.

Juliet Day Development Officer

A booking form with full descriptions, details, times and prices is enclosed. All places are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. To book a place, please complete and return the enclosed booking form. Please take care to note the new cancellation and refund policy outlined on the booking form.

Tour of the Alpine Section Tuesday 23 April, Thursday 25 April, Saturday 27 April, 10.30am Join the Alpine & Woodland team to go behind the scenes and discover the highlights of the season (tulips and fritillaries should be at their best). Ends with coffee and cake at the Garden Café.

Early birds tour Tuesday 7 May, Friday 10 May, Sunday 19 May, Thursday 23 May, 8am Make the most of the peaceful hours before opening to join one of our expert ornithologists to see, hear and learn about the Garden’s birdlife.

Finishes with a delicious breakfast at the Garden Café.

Day outing to Rousham House & Garden and Waterperry Gardens Wednesday 5 June 2013 Rousham’s rolling parkland features temples, cascades, ponds, rills and a seven-arched Praeneste.

We spend the afternoon at Waterperry Gardens where Beatrix Havergal was inspired to establish the first School of Horticulture for Ladies in 1932.

Day outing to Felbrigg Hall & Peter Beales Roses Wednesday 26 June 2013 Felbrigg Hall is a fine 17th century house set in over 1700 acres. There’s a delightful walled kitchen garden, orangery, dovecote and lake.

En route we stop for coffee & cake at Peter Beales – June will be perfect for the roses.

Other diary dates Voicing the Garden coffee morning Friday 22 February, 11am in the Classroom Come and find out about the project – perhaps you can help or join in? Please book your attendance with Juliet Day on 01223 762994 or jcd35@cam.ac.uk Chemicals from Plants tours Saturday 23 March, 10.30am – 12 noon and again 1.30-3pm Join Gwenda Kydd for a guided tour to learn why plants produce a great range of chemicals, and how we can harness and use, and sometimes must avoid, their active components! Booking via the Cambridge Science Festival please.

Festival of Plants Saturday 18 May, 10am – 4pm Don’t miss this celebration of all things plant: find out about the latest plant science research, come to our own gardeners’ question time with your dilemmas, enjoy a plant family picnic on the Systematics Beds, stock up with unusual plants from invited specialist nurseries and join in Voicing the Garden.