Friends


The past few weekends have been busy with friends visiting and again acting as a guide to the local sites.




Dinner at my house one evening, missing is Dipali from India. We are (left to right) Issac a first year PhD candidate Ghana, me, Bakaray, my MSc partner in plant conservation from The Gambia and Alfred, the senior guy, a final year PhD from Ghana also.










A view of the twin sisters, a few miles over the downs. There is another in town that somone lives in. They were used for milling oats and are not uncommon in Sussex.

















One of many old churches in the area, this is an old Norman style and if my history lessons serve me well it is from about 1050-1200, very, very old to us Canadians, it is in the nearby village of Pyecombe.












Yet more views of the downs, the pictures never do it justice and I never tire of enjoying them.






























It is still fairly mild here, although some mornings as of late we have had frost, still it is never too cold for walks along the beach.









The beach at Brigton is quite unusual in that is a pebble beach that is comprised of flint. Flint a very hard stone that when broken produces a very sharp edge was often used in primative times as knives and tips for spears. It is stil used today in buildings and as a decorative material in gardens, often used as a crushed gravel. There are some unique ecoystems found along the beach and in the spring I hope to be able to photograph them, some include Crambe cordifolia growing.







Olivia from the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, visiting Kew and here obviously at Brighton beach.

Kirstenbosh is one of the gardens I must visit, similar flora exists at my favourite garden here in England, Tresco on the Isles of Scilly, in Cornwall. If Adam is reading this, there is a book on Kirstenbosch in the library brought back by some great friends Joyce and Darcy whose garden I have worked on.

The link for the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens through the South African National Biodiversity Institute:

http://www.sanbi.org/frames/kirstfram.htm







We spent some of the afternoon on Brighton Pier, trying the various rides.











Walter and I on the pier, Walter is a seed collector from South Africa.

The Millennium Seed Bank, Wakehurst Place.





The millennium Seed Bank was built as a millennium project and opened in 2000.
Its main objective at the time was to house the seed of all UK flora. It has achieved this and currently stores seed for other member countries as well. As you can see from these pictures it is an extensive building with research labs, seed storage vault, seed cleaning facilities, office and lecture space as well as residential facilities for students/researchers. It has a life expectancy of five hundred years and the vault can apparently withstand the impact of a plane crash since it is on the flight path for Gatwick airport.

http://www.kew.org/msbp/



The building is quite unique in that visitors can see most of the work undertaken by staff. Visitors enter the middle of the building and through glass walls on either side can view the labs and seed treatment facilities, they can even at the end where this photo was taken, look down into the seed vault although they do not have access.





When seeds arrive in cotton or paper bags they are dried to 15% MC, this is critical since it halts seed metabolism and ensures seed longevity. They are held in the drying room which is also a quarantine centre until ready for cleaning.












The seed cleaning lab uses a variety of equipment to clean the seed, from mechanical apirators to hand sieves. As much of the chaff and seed capsule is removed as possible without damaging the seed, this will help maximize storage space.




















All seed lots are X rayed to determine viability, this image demonstrates potential viable and non viable embryos, some even show insect damage. This is not a measure of seed germination potential however.







Our group in the residential course was quite diverse, with people from South Africa, United States, England, Greece, Italy, Uganda and The Gambia. Here we are studying fruit morphology in the lab on day two. The course was quite intense and began at 9:00am and usually ran until 5:30pm. Of course many nights were spent at the pub.










Seed dissection to determine embryo viability was challenging especially with small seeds under the electronic microscopes. Many seeds went scittering across the lab floor.









The entrance to the seed packing room and the storage vaults.

Once the seed is cleaned and prooofed (cut tests, X ray etc.) it is sent down to the vault, this(below) is the packing room outside the -20c vaults




















Jars of seed ready to go into the vault, the seed lots do not contain plant names just numbers. The reasoning for this is quite simple, plant names are in a continual state of flux and as the seed is stored for a long time (hundreds of years) the labels would have to be changed also. Plant names and the resigstration number are maintained in the data base, and the plant name can be easily changed there without interupting storage in the vault.








If you go to the link I posted near the top of the page you can find the full story of how these plants (below) grew from 200 year old seed, here seen in The millennium Seed Bank greenhouse being grown on to confirm indentification, several of the original packets were mislabeled.

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The last day before we all went our separate ways, two from the University of Sussex, six from the University of Birmingham, two from Kirsentbosch Botanical Gardens in South Africa, one from the New England Wildflower Society (Garden in the Woods), one from the New York CityParks Department (native plant nursery) and one from the North Carolina Botanic Gardens.

The House and Gardens of Wakehurst Place, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

Pictured is the main mansion at Wakehurst Place, this used to house the millennium Seed Bank, now it functions as an activity centre. Wakehurst, managed by Kew but owned by the National Trust is the most visited trust garden in England.

As you have no doubt realized I have been a little lapse in updating the blog. As with most students I have experienced the intensity of the end of term. Classes finished for most this past week, however since we are out of alignment we still have another week to go with a substantial lab report to submit and an oral presentation on Monday.

I have spent the past couple of Saturdays in the lab working on transforming the resurrection plant Craterostigma plantagineuum with Agrobacterium tumefaciens. I conclude this experiment in two weeks by handing the cultured plants with the transferred genes off to the researchers at the University of York. I think the experiment has been a success with many plants hopefully carrying the transferred genes: York will have to authenticate this through PCR (My students should know all about this since I have been posting all my lab reports and essays online, if anyone else is interested I can send them to you but they are much too long and boring for most to post here).

I am putting the blog up in two to three sections, this posting will show pictures of the gardens at Wakehurst Place. Wakehurst is home to the Millennium Seed Bank and is the main arboretum for Kew proper which is about 60km away. We spent the week of November 27th staying at the seed bank and so I had some time in the morning to walk the grounds and take a few pictures, it is getting cold here at times as that is frost you see on the lawns.

For those that have a good memory, there is a picture of the Red Border at Wakehurst in my house (Adam and Anita can show you if you drop by) in the hallway outside the downstairs bathroom. That picture was taken on our NPC field trip in 1986 with the infamous Tom Laviolette; it has only taken me 20 years to return.
Below is the famous Red Border today, obviously not in full form but alas it is November, however it still looks good to me.

It is hard to believe that the Rhododendrons are flowering in November, but many are along with Mahonia, Bergenia and the occasionall Viburnum, I understood it snowed yesterday, while I walked along the beach eating a Cornish Pasty, I know some of you will make me pay for rubbing it in.

Wakhurst Place is essentially a woodland garden with deep valleys where the stream dissectss the gardens. This terminates in a resivoir at the bottom of the 600 acre estate and the Lode Valley. In 1987 a hurricane swept across southern England and devastated many gardens by toppling large trees. Wakehurst was severelyy hit but today there is little evidence of the devastation.

http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/visitor/visitwp.html

Several have asked for my address here in England, here it is: 73 Holingbury Park Avenue, Brighton, BN1 7JQ, United Kingdom.

Guy Fawkes Night



England moves by train, they are cheap and efficient. In fact it is cheaper for me to take the train to the university every day than the bus: a roundtrip train fare is £2.50 or about $5.20. England was built on rails and they went to great lengths to ensure that they were not disruptive. This is a viaduct that traverses a part of downtown Brighton; it is over 100 years old and is quite a feat of engineering, especially when you consider it is made of bricks.

As I mentioned earlier there are now two of us in the MSc Plant Conservation course. Bakary Seenah joined me mid-October. He is from The Gambia where he is in charge of the seed collection unit for that country. It is quite interesting talking to him; we take so much for granted. There are five people in our lab, they are all coming over for dinner tonight so I hope to post a group shot, we have a Canadian (me) a Gambian, two Ghanese and a Indian.

The weather has been incredible of late and I spent Thursday afternoon on the beach, people were actually swimming. On Saturday I took off with Geoff, the musician who lives in the flat above me for Lewes for Guy Fawkes Night.

To get to Lewes, we biked up to Ditchling Beacon and across the ridge of the South Downs, this is the highest point of land around and in the distance you can see the North Downs which I am told are not as spectacular. The large complex is Plymton Agricultural College.

The town of Lewes has a 400 year tradition of bonfires and parades; the town of 12,000 people is inundated on November 5 by 50,000 visitors. We went by bike since it was an hour wait to get back out by train. The pictures do not do it justice; it was absolutely incredible with each of the societies trying to out do each other. Every November 5 people burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the houses of parliament. It is celebrated in Lewes since, on the edge of town a battle was fought that eventually lead to the formation of parliament.

Guy Fawkes , 1606, also known as Guido Fawkes, born in York, was an English Soldier and member of a group of Roman Catholics who attempted to carry out the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November 1605. The plot was an attempt to assinate the Protestant King James I (James VI of Scotland) and the members of both houses of the Parliment of England. He tried to achieve this by blowing up Westminster Palace during the formal opening session of the 1605 Parliament, in which the king would address a joint assembly of both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Guy Fawkes was in large part responsible for the later stages of the plan's execution. His activities were detected, however, before the plan's completion. Following a severe interrogation involving the use of torture and a trial at Westminster Hall , Fawkes and his conspirators were executed for treason and attempted murder.

Of course all that cycling is thirsty work; we came back via the local pub in Falmer Village at the university. I am a local here now and know the owner and his wife quite well as we closed the pub on Saturday night. John, the landlord is an avid model train enthusiast and has one running around the top of the bar.

On the Beach


On the beach is a title from one of my favourite albums by Chris Rea. This was where most of Saturday was spent, it was warm and sunny, however the planned bicycle trip over the East Downs on Sunday was postponed because of the torrential downpours. I was joined by Bakery in the MSc course this week; he arrived late and is from the Gambia where he is in charge of the countries first seed bank, hence I can see a trip to the Gambia one summer. He had not been into town; he stays at the university, so this was my chance to act as tour guide.





Brighton has one main pier nowadays and that’s where most of the photographs were taken from, as you can see it is quite a distance out and reminds me of Coney Island since it is all cheap food and cheap amusements.



From the current pier you can see the remnants of the old pier that was abandoned and then recently caught fire. They plan on building a tall viewing ‘Thing’ on this site and it is quite controversial since it will clash with the regency architecture that fronts that part of the beach. Frank Gehry has a project planned for the ocean front as well; it looks like a building undergoing convulsions, typical Gehry style. I will try to get an image to share with you at some point.





















On Brighton pier of course is where the crippled Jonathan Livingston Seagull hangs out after failing at his high flying acrobatics. It is amazing how smart he is ( how do you determine the sex of a seagull?), there he stands on one leg at feeding height in the midst of all, looking for handouts, all he needed was a cup and sign.





















On the way back from the pier we passed the Quaker Meeting House, actually we went in since they were having a sale of local produce. I put this in for my friend Tina who is a Quaker and once took me to the Quaker meeting house in Coldstream. Tina, they all have the same feeling, this one however sits on prime real estate close to the ocean in the old part of town.















The final shot is the last hill I go down everyday that I ride the bike to the university, and of course it is one of the first four I must go up on my return journey home. This was taken half way before I entered Stamnar Woods for the rest of the climb.