Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

And then I went off to Bath and had three wonderful work experience periods.

House of Roche and Houseplants, Wisley and RBG Edinburgh.

And then after that, I was thinking, so what am I going to do now? But I graduated.

And I never thought about being a lecturer, but the job came up at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh for a lecturer in the School of Horticulture.

We've got an amazing plant, Sisybeta alpina, and that's a discovery by George Don in the Scottish mountains.

And what's really special about that plant, it absolutely loves growing here in the explorer's garden, but the Royal Botanics at the minute are actually rewilding and getting that plant back out into its natural habitat because it's on the red list, it's endangered.

And they've started that over the last year or so.

So that's really quite special because that link is linked to our garden and to George Don.

But what's special about these trees are that they started life off in Hiroshima.

We've got five or six really growing well.

They were seedlings when they were first brought into the garden and they were gifted from the Royal Botanics, but its hereditary was actually from Hiroshima.

So I think it's a really special plant to talk about.

And the Michaelmulleria genus name, it is a bit of a mouthful, and as is often the case, this genus has been named after somebody connected with plants, but not the person who collected this species.

Now, he's a chap called Michael Moller, who works at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, and he does research into gesneriads.

And perhaps a look at where this plant grows will illustrate why it hasn't been described to science before 2020.

It's tricky terrain, to say the least.

So she'd been a bit worried about me working by myself all the time, and I think a lot of us gardeners quite enjoy that, and I think maybe some people don't understand, but when it's just you and the plants, it's a lovely thing.

So she'd said, "Oh, maybe you want to do a course or something like that." And I thought, "Well, I've always been one for doing many different courses." Had a little look at, um, Edinburgh Botanic Gardens.

They do some fantastic courses, and they had a diploma in garden history.

And I've always been into history, but I'd never really done anything on the gardening side.