'Ave a Good Weekend

Apart from a short quote about how many plants species are in peril in this week's Guardian, all is quiet on the Entwisle media front in London. A good thing, I hear the chorus from Sydney and Melbourne.

This weekend Amanda Hooton's article about the boy from Nhill ran in the Good Weekend, in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Good Weekend is one of those quaint magazines that exists only in hard copy, or through obscure pay-by-page websites such as PressDisplay. [Later: I've managed to load, I think, into a google page for general access - The Constant Gardener.]

Amanda spent part of two days with me, as she says. Apart from a few squeamish parts (for me) and a couple of small errors (no doubt due to me gabbling a little too hurriedly), it's a fair record of our time together. Perhaps I could have done without the flagrant breaking of botanic gardens regulations (climbing trees, forgetting staff number) and the bagging of my daily coffee source, but that's a day in the life.

It was good fun showing off my new work place and talking about plants and, apparently, algae. Who would have know I like algae? As it happens I've had little time for my favourite photosynthetic organism in my first six months but I hope to rectify that.

In fact I started on Wednesday with a trip to Whitchurch and New Forest with Lynda and two colleagues ex of the Natural History Museum - David John and Jenny Moore - and Simon Moore. It was fun to talk algae all day - despite Amanda's story I spend little time, except to trapped journalists, extolling the virtues of algae - and to collect three, yes three, different species of my very favourite algae Batrachospermum (see growing here on a bottle - ready for jokes about this being another great red...algae...yes, even though it's a beer bottle!)

I've pickled the algae and put some in silica gel for my colleague Morgan Vis, usually in Ohio in the USA, but currently on sabbatical in Paris, to sequence.

New Forest was not only rich with algae (two of the species) but also fungi and autumn leaves. The fungus is Leucopaxillus giganteus I think (I've put it on iSpot to have it confirmed).

What more could you ask for? A couple of pictures not included in the Good Weekend article but taken in the same 'shoot' by Neale Haynes? A pleasure to assist....