Month: February 2014
Manchester Museum Allotment
Spring is (almost) in the air and so we’ve been making plans for the Museum allotment.
Volunteers and staff have been growing food in raised beds in the courtyard outside the entrance of the Museum since 2011. The original aims of the Museum Allotment were to be a positive example of our connections with nature, as expressed in the gallery Living Worlds and be part of the Museum’s vision of promoting a sustainable world.
We’ve grown and given away potatoes, nasturtium, blackcurrants, rhubarb and strawberries. In 2012 we grew sunflowers for a citizen science project and in our shed we put up posters about gardening, nature and food events in Manchester. There is a green roof on the shed. The Allotment has hosted participatory events where children and adults have planted seeds, made bird boxes, pressed apples, watered the beds and there have been many conversations about food and growing. We’ve participated in the Big Butterfly count and seen many earthworms, cabbage flies, aphids, ladybirds and…
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Manchester Herbarium
A lovely review of a visit to our herbarium from the blog of Tim Body: Manchester Herbarium. Tim is an MMU ecology student and his blog From here to ecology is well worth a read.
Buttercups at Cambridge
The course I attended (Flowering Plant Families) is run by Cambridge University staff. This is Dr Tim Upson introducing the course at the Botanic Garden, by the lake. We had just seen a grass snake and joked about how plants often get upstaged by animals!
Ranunculaceae is the Buttercup family, which contains many ornamentals. Well known members are the buttercup (obvs), Delphinium, Aquilegia and Thalictrum. The plants are mainly herbs, with a few climbers (Clematis). It has a world wide distribution and plants in this family contain alkaloids – some are poisonous, like Aconitum.
The family name Ranunculaceae is pronounced ran-un-queue –lacey.
A buttercup pulled apart: this family is not characterised by the number of petals and sepals as they are variable. Linking characters for Ranunculaceae: flower parts are free and not fused, and spirally arranged along the elongated receptacle. There are numerous stamens and carpels.
Buttercups are actinomorphic which means they are radially symmetrical, as opposed to zygomorphic (bilaterally symmetrical). Think of a cup and saucer – the saucer is actinomorphic (symmetrical along 3 planes) but the cup is zygomorphic (symmetrical along 2 planes).
The following three illustrations of Hellebore varieties are taken from our cultivated collection. Despite names such as ‘Christmas Rose’, this plant is not in the rose family but the buttercup family. The first is from ‘The Garden’ the monthly magazine of the Royal Horticultural Society, 1879. The second was from another horticultural magazine: Edwards’s Botanical Register by S.T. Edwards & J. Lindley, 1838, and the third illustration was taken from Paxton’s Flower Garden, 1850-53 by J. Paxton.
A herbarium sheet of Anemone nemorosa (wood anemone), from the buttercup family, collected by Lydia Becker in Whalley Wood, April 1864 for the British Botanical Competition. Lydia Becker was a suffragette and was born in Chadderton, Manchester.