Love your... ferns

Originally a means of keeping a living record of garden plants, our 722 National Plant Collections–of everything from Abies to Zingiber –set the gold standard across the world. Charles Quest-Ritson meets some of the expert collection holders

For almost 30 years, Valerie Finnis was a distinguished and charismatic teacher at the Waterperry Horticultural school for Women, near Oxford, founded in 1932 by the fearsomely smocked and gaitered Be

IT being the season for the painted purple ...

Irene Thomson has a dream. A passionate plantswoman on a tight budget, she dreams of being able to visit a nursery with an unlimited amount to spend: “I wish I had a big budget,” she says. I would buy

Mass extinctions and evolutionary leaps, from bacteria to Homo sapiens

Spectacular, intriguing and rather bizarre, Sarracenia is a group of plants that defies expectation. Their bold and colourful trumpets look exotic, even alien, yet they are resoundingly earthbound, an