How have the words and deeds of scientists, writers, collectors, researchers and conservationists shaped our understanding of the natural world and our place in it? Sorted! By Word and Deed will explore.
Your ticket price includes admission to the Garden (opens at 10am), all the talks, morning refreshments and sandwich lunch from the Garden Café, and optional tours at the end of the day.
No pollination in Darwin’s Garden: Shelley Innes, Darwin Correspondence project
Mobilising Economic Botany: Kew Gardens and the circulation of useful plants: Dr Caroline Cornish, Royal Holloway, University of London
Morning II
Putting it out there: the sexual chemistry of flowering plants: Dr Alison Foster, University of Kent, School of Anthropology and Conservation
Bright and beautiful, but not for our benefit: the blooming relationship between flowering plants and their insect pollinators: Dr Ed Turner, Department of Zoology, Cambridge University
Afternoon Session I
You say potato, I say tomato: let’s call the whole thing Solanaceae TBC: Dr Sandy Knapp, Natural History Museum
The Hort Sort: sorting out the Garden’s Systematic Beds: Sally Petitt, Cambridge University Botanic Garden
Afternoon Session II: optional tours
Trees of the Botanic Garden
The Systematics Beds
Speaker Biographies Day 3
Caroline Cornish is a Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Her interests lie at the intersection of the histories of science and museums and she currently engaged on the Mobile Museum research project, looking at the circulation of economic botany specimens through Kew over the 19th and 20th centuries.
Alison Foster followed a PhD in chemistry with eight years in the pharmaceutical industry before her passion for plants got the upper hand. After retraining as a horticulturalist at Birmingham Botanical Gardens she joined the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, where she worked for almost seven years, ultimately as Acting Director. Alison now works to make science accessible to the public through horticulture and plants via a range of projects, including the recent Temperate House restoration at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Shelley Innes is a research editor of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Although her first love was Darwin’s barnacle research, she has become equally enthusiastic about his later work with plants. She has a special interest in Darwin’s correspondence with German botanists.
Sandy Knapp is Head of the Plants Division of the Natural History Museum, London. Her research focuses on the nightshade family Solanaceae, especially the megadiverse genus Solanum, which contains potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines. Sandy is currently President of the Linnean Society, London.
Sally Petitt is Head of Horticulture at Cambridge University Botanic Garden. She is responsible for all horticultural aspects of the Garden, and has most recently managed the implementation of landscape change on the Systematic Beds, including design of the new beds and their content.
Ed Turner is Curator of Insects at the University Museum of Zoology, where he is responsible for a collection of over a million insect specimens. He runs research projects in both the UK and Southeast Asia, investigating ways that human-dominated landscapes can be managed to conserve higher levels of biodiversity.
Or telephone on 01223 357851
Or in person at 2 Wheeler Street