2018

12 January. Gallery tour of Richard Spruce Amazon rainforest exhibition, Shirley Sherwood Gallery, midday. Free (included in Kew admission) but please book ahead at 020 8332 3622 or email shirleysherwoodgallery@kew.org

10 January. Talk:  Festive Botany: plants of Christmas and New Year. 8pm, Greeno Centre, Shepperton (SW London).

5 January. Research Pages updated.

2017
24 November-18 December: Fieldwork in Oahu, Hawaii, with Dr Andy Mills and the Situating Tapa project.

22 November. Talk: Silk at Kew. At Silk Unravelled

23 October. Appointed Visiting Professor in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London.

11 October. Talk: with Kim Walker A Tale of Two
Cities: Assembling Cinchona Bark Collections in Leiden and London. UCL Spices symposium

10 October. Hosting Annual Ethnobotany Lecture at Kew.

7 October - 11 March. Two exhibitions in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew: Plantae Amazonicae and Life in Death. Both feature Economic Botany specimens.

September: Blog post Botanical Wonders in Warrington

August. New manual on ethnobotany: Manual de Etnobotânica: Plantas, artefatos e Conhecimentos Indígenas

August. New working paper out from Mobile Museum project: The Economic Botany Collection at Kew: Analysis of Accessions Data

Earlier news
I work at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,  as ResearchLeader for Economic Botany and curator of the Economic Botany Collection (EBC) and am a Visiting Professor in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway - University of London.. 

As the photograph above hints, the EBC is extraordinarily varied in its holdings, aspiring to represent all uses of all plants in all places. While it might never have quite completed that task, the efforts of curators and collectors since 1847 make the EBC a wonderfully rich resource for research and teaching on many aspects of botany, history, anthropology and art and design. After a decade working in it, I feel I have barely scratched the surface.

This website allows me to talk about my work at greater length than on Kew's official site (here is my Kew page), but readers will probably find it useful to see the official EBC pages.
Above all, I hope these pages will encourage students and other researchers interested in using the EBC to contact  me to discuss how we can work together.