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Cultivation of the genus Pelargonium under glass

This paper describes the cultivation under glass of the genus Pelargonium. The difference between Pelargonium and the other four genera in the family Geraniaceae is noted and a list of species grown at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is provided. The use of the genus in the display glasshouses at this botanic garden is described followed by notes on cultivation including watering, nutrition, pruning, pest control, and propagation. The use of pelargoniums in the commercial and medicinal industries follows

Battlegrounds of environmental change

The Thames catchment encompasses one of Europe’s largest cities, the UK’s principal aquifer, an extensive zone of coastal interaction and much else. It presents a unique conjunction of geological, hydrogeological, environmental and socio-economic factors that are intrinsically linked by the effects of environmental change and the pressures of developmen

Sourcing in humanitarian logistics: local, regional, and global approaches

Sourcing and procurement of materials and services is a vital part of humanitarian logistics. Humanitarian organisations tend to combine local sourcing and international approaches, resulting in considerable complexity. This paper establishes a better understanding of the factors that influence sourcing decisions in humanitarian supply chains. 38 semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals involved in both developmental and emergency humanitarian responses. Findings show that the philosophy of a particular humanitarian organisation has a considerable effect on their sourcing strategy, in addition to more practical issues such as local availability of goods and services, and quality control

The National Botanic Garden of Nepal

The National Botanic Garden of Nepal (NBG) lies 16km south of Kathmandu, at the base of Phulchowki, the highest mountain in the Kathmandu Valley. It was inaugurated in 1962 by King Mahendra and since that time the collections have developed, many of them into named areas and groupings. The year 2016 was the bicentenary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Nepal and Great Britain, and this was marked in the NBG with the development of a Biodiversity Education Garden. This was created in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), and the occasion signified a revitalisation of collaborative relations between the NBG and British botanic gardens which started in the early 1960s with the appointment to NBG of British horticulturists Geoffrey Herklots and, later, Tony Schilling. The history of the garden, its layout and collections, and the activities and outcomes of the recent collaborations are described and illustrated with colour photographs

Foreword

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Foreword

Introduction to Number 15

Cultivation and Hardiness Notes for Blechnum cycadifolium

Blechnum cycadifolium is an evergreen fern from the Juan Fenandez islands. This paper starts by describing its collection, propagation and cultivation and then considers its hardiness. Three planting areas are described, followed by notes about how the plants overwintered in these areas

The uneven profile of memory development in Down Syndrome

This thesis explores memory development in children with Down syndrome (DS) between aged 3 years and 9 months and 14 years and 5 months (N=43). While memory has been extensively explored in older individuals with DS, relatively little work has considered the development of memory in childhood in DS, in part due to the difficulty of assessing memory in individuals with lower levels of ability. The project was innovative in applying a mixture of original and pre-existing tasks to this population, in order to characterise a wide range of memory abilities at varying levels of cognitive demand. These abilities were initially compared between those with DS and typically developing individuals by age group, early childhood (3 years 9 months to 8 years 4 months) and late childhood (9 years 9 months to 14 years 5 months). Standardised tasks were used to produce mental-age equivalents and raw scores for verbal and non-verbal memory abilities (BPVS, BAS II pattern construction). Study 1 examined object and object-in-place recognition using eye-tracking, using a low demand methodology that excluded few participants. Study 2 examined verbal working and long-term memory abilities overall, as well as learning and forgetting rates. Primacy, recency and mid-list recall rates were also analysed to shed light on strategies of encoding. Study 3 examined spatial working and long-term memory abilities, as well as forgetting rates. Study 4 examined multimodal associative immediate and delayed memory, using a spatialauditory associative eye-tracking paradigm. Study 5 examined the relationships between sustained attention, inhibition, and sleep behaviour measures, as these faculties are implicated in the development of memory abilities. Finally, in Study 6, cross-sectional developmental trajectories were constructed for all memory measures to ascertain if base levels or gradients of change significantly differed, either with respect to chronological age or domain-relevant mental age measures, in comparison to a sample of typically developing children. Overall, the project charted the emergence of an uneven profile of memory abilities across childhood in DS