Wild and Rare: Plant Stories from the Highlands and Islands

Using artefacts in the Perth Museum and Art Gallery collections as inspiration and drawing on research carried out as part of the UHI ‘Precious Persistence’ project, this talk will tell tales of wild and rare plants from Perthshire to Shetland and from the Firth of Forth to the island of Rum. It will consider the importance of botanical writing and recording in seeking to mitigate shifting baseline syndrome where knowledge is lost between generations leading to an incomplete understanding of how nature is changing. The ‘Precious Persistence’ project funded by the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities in collaboration between the Institute for Northern Studies and Centre for Mountain Studies at UHI with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Rebecca Cornwell is a PhD student at UHI Orkney and based at UHI Perth. Her PhD project Precious Persistence seeks to understand how historical writings about Shetland wild plants are shaping our modern understanding of rare plant ecology and how we experience rare plants today.