Submitted by Helen C. Scott on Thu, 01/10/2015 - 09:34
Pete Carey has spent two weeks in the mountains of Vyots Dzor in Armenia collecting plants of a restricted range species, Potentilla porphyrantha. They have been working on a site that is due to be mined in the coming years. The plants are being translocated to a new glasshouse that they have built at Sevan in one of three botanic gardens in Armenia. All of the gardens are in a poor state following a lack of funding in the post-Soviet era. The extraction of plants from rocks required a combination of delicate excavation with those and brute force using hammers and chisels in some pretty challenging terrain.