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I am off to Leiden to learn a spot of botany

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Jodie

Jodie

Native
Aug 25, 2006
1,561
11
56
London
www.google.co.uk
Hooray - I will be attending the "International Course in Economic Botany" at the
Nationaal Herbarium for the first two weeks in September learning lots about the
interactions between people and plants. It's more about crop plants than indigenous
uses, so not particularly bushcrafty but I'm still very excited to learn a little more
about plants. I'm not sure if this really counts as 'getting out there' although we'll
be handling actual plant material (and I'll be out of the country!) but I think I'll
enjoy it anyway.
http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/EconomicBotany/home.htm

Here's what they learned last year:
http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/EconomicBotany/EconBotProg2006.htm

:red:
 
Jodie said:
Hooray - I will be attending the "International Course in Economic Botany" at the
Nationaal Herbarium for the first two weeks in September learning lots about the
interactions between people and plants. It's more about crop plants than indigenous
uses, so not particularly bushcrafty but I'm still very excited to learn a little more
about plants. I'm not sure if this really counts as 'getting out there' although we'll
be handling actual plant material (and I'll be out of the country!) but I think I'll
enjoy it anyway.
http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/EconomicBotany/home.htm

Here's what they learned last year:
http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/EconomicBotany/EconBotProg2006.htm

:red:
Click to expand...

Nice one Jodie!
I've read about it before and it sounds really interesting :D So let us (me, as a Dutchie) know how it went. Leiden is beautiful city, with some characteristic architecture, canals and lots and lots of students!!!
May I have a beer - Mag ik een biertje (= dutch) ;)

:D
 
I'm really looking forwards to seeing Leiden too - I'd not really heard of the place
before (sorry!) but apparently it's spectacularly famous and Carl Linnaeus (who's
having his 300th anniversary this year) hung out there too. Plenty of plant stuff
going on and a science museum close to the station 'Naturalis' - I will have
a lovely time I think :-)
 
Jodie said:
I'm really looking forwards to seeing Leiden too - I'd not really heard of the place
before (!) but apparently it's spectacularly famous and Carl Linnaeus (who's
having his 400th anniversary this year) hung out there too. Plenty of plant stuff
going on and a science museum close to the station 'Naturalis' - I will have
a lovely time I think :-)
Click to expand...

I think you will like Naturalis. There´s also an ethnological museum in Leiden, unfortunelately by the time you get to Leiden their temporary exposition about food around the world will be finished but the normal collection sholuld well be worth a look.

Have fun overhere and if you have anymore questions don´t be afraid to ask (not that you are a shy person...)

Cheers,

Tom
 
Having a fantastic time here (and it's Linnaeus' 300th not 400th birthday apparently!) in
Leiden learning loads about human and plant interactions. Lots about early civilisations
but nearer the time of cultivating plants rather than really early, early civilisations although
we covered that briefly and even had a little detour into dinosaurs! (Herbivorous ones...)

Apparently the reason we have hardwood trees in the first place is because of some sort
of arms race between plants trying to prevent themselves from getting eaten and
herbivores that are giving it their best shot. I've discovered how wood actually grows - can
you believe I didn't know this? (to be fair I've mostly studied animal physiology before).
Know a bit more about tannins and lignin - but not that much more ;-)

It's great :D

Also I've spotted that museum but it shuts at five so might have to have a bit of a museum
frenzy on the weekend and try and see that one and Naturalis as well - might even try
and get to Amsterdam or back to Den Haag (The Hague) as they have museums too!

We have to give a presentation at the end on an economically important crop and I'm
hoping to do mine on bere which seems to be a type of barley grown mostly in Orkney
and promoted as a local food (you can buy beer, bannocks and biscuits made from
beremeal - I am wondering if Argo the bakery might post a couple of packs of biscuits
so that I can share with the class!).

It's lucky that I've been sampling some of the trendier cereals of late (there's a hippy food
shop near where I work) such as quinoa and spelt as I have a sense of familiarity now
when they are mentioned!

I have also tried crisps made from cassava and some bamboo shoots - I like doing
courses where you get to sample the material under discussion.

Wherever possible I am mentioning anything remotely bushcrafty that pops into my
head during the lessons hehe.
 
Great to hear you are enjoying yourself Jodie.

If you want to be really popular you must learn to use the following phrase everytime you find yourself in a pub:
"Rondje voor de hele zaak!"

Cheers,

Tom

PS The city of Haarlem has also got some good museums
 
I am Janie :-)
Tom - is that "it's my round"?!

Today I've eaten macadamia nuts and palm hearts (in syrup - yuck) and admired some
very complicated-looking rattan baskets from Borneo. One even had a panel at the front
which you could remove or adjust. We learned about the seed of the tung tree from which
an oil used to be produced commercially, and the seeds are also burned and the soot
used in Indonesia in tattooing - I did wonder if that was what Stuart had had but
couldn't remember; might check later.

Yesterday afternoon I managed to get to the ethnological museum and was amazed
by the barkcloth clothing from Indonesia - I might have to go back and have another
look.

I have also learned a suspicious amount about brewing ale with barley malt for my
bere (a type of barley) project...
 
I was given a tour of the herbarium collections on Friday afternoon after class - I'd asked
earlier if it was possible to see where all these weird and wonderful things kept appearing
from. Each class is illustrated with material from the collection and at the end of the
lecture we all congregate at the front and 'meet' the specimens and where possible eat
samples of them.

Anyway it was the most amazing place downstairs in the bowels (OK ground floor) of the
building with row upon row of boxes containing dried specimens and sections of wood, and
the spirit collection (jars containing specimens soaked in alcoholic spirits) which allows
the item(s) to float freely so that you can see the shapes / morphology more clearly than
in dried specimens; these things have been collected in the last 150 or so years so in
addition to the interest inherent in the plant material itself there's the added intrigue of
labels handwritten in the 1850s etc. which are themselves very lovely. As a semi-
librarian I appreciate neatly ordered and valued specimens :)

There are also items made from plants and wood rather than just the raw material in the
formal collections so plenty of wicker-type work and some rather startling three pronged
arrows with the prongs at front made from nicely carved wood.

I'll try and put some pictures up but because I've never managed this before I'll start a
new post because otherwise this text might get mangled...
 
Fingers crossed there will be some photos below and I am
deliberately keeping the text very very 'left justified'! Although
it's nothing to do with bushcraft can I just say how fantastic
the transport system is in Holland - the trams of Den Haag
are wonderful and everything seems to work like clockwork.

Hmm...
"Your file of 328.9 KB bytes exceeds the forum's limit of
97.7 KB for this filetype."
(will have a think about this one... )

Edit - plan B
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75126686@N00/sets/72157601920794412/
(you have to click on the photo to see my comments, though
it's pretty self-explanatory).
 
I'm a science communicator - probably best described as translating science to English ;-)

My background is in laboratory science (analytical chemistry relating to biology and
pharmacology) and I decided I preferred talking about science rather than actually
doing stuff in laboratories. At the moment I'm a science information officer for the health
charity Diabetes UK so I explain the science behind diabetes to anyone who wants
to know (usually members of the public who have the condition, or healthcare
professionals as part of their continuing professional development) about it.

Because I physically sit in the science library I'm kind of a de facto librarian although I
don't have any qualifications in librarianship (which was actually a prerequisite of the job
so I was quite lucky to get it, but my science / nerdy side is strong enough!) so the
whole idea of information being well ordered and accessible is a big plus and plant
identification and taxonomy is a good example of a knowledge management system
hehe.

This is actually not remotely related to my work - just for fun. Having said that, around
25% of pharmaceutical preparations have their origins in plant material anyway, and
plants are able to produce a vast array of weird and wonderful chemical compounds which
can be probed for pharmacological activitity and tweaked if necessary. Quite a few also
come from animal or soil microorganisms too.

An example from my own field would be Galega officinalis (goat's rue, French lilac) which
is known to contain a chemical that reduces blood glucose levels and has been used by
people to reduce one of the symptoms of diabetes - production of copious volumes of
sweet urine. Unfortunately, without a meter that can measure the concentration of
glucose in the blood, you wouldn't know if the levels of glucose were 'OK' or merely lower
than the level at which excess glucose spills over into the urine - so not a particularly
reliable medicine, though better than nothing. Worse though is the fact that the actual
chemical is really quite toxic and so a safer alternative has been developed called
metformin which is used in Type 2 diabetes.
http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/full/108/8/1105

I'm very fortunate because my job exactly matches my interests and skills but I'll stop
there cos honestly I'd blether on and on about it for hours otherwise ;)
 
While collecting material for my "school project" which is a presentation we give the
class on Friday I came across this Neolithic hamper on sale:
http://www.judithglue.com/hampers/morehamperslinkpage.htm
Now that's what I call marketing :D

Ahjno: I'm sure you would like this course - I can't imagine that anyone wouldn't!
We've covered a fair bit of indigenous uses so my first post isn't quite accurate - but
we've covered EVERYTHING; plants used for medicines, for clothing, for ornament,
for flavouring, for addictive recreational drugs, for insect repellants (preventive rather
than medicine), appearance of crops in the fertile crescent and subsequent cultivation
elsewhere - and lots more. It's vastly fascinating.

My project's on bere - a type of barley that's gaining popularity in niche products like
beer, bannocks and biscuits.

Jo
 
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