Medicinal Garden Project - Progress Report November 2007

1. Ms Joanne Smith was appointed to the position created by the £12,000 award from the Centre for Teaching and Learning- Applied Undergraduate Research Skills to work for 6 months creating a bank of new plant-based projects for final-year students taking biological, biomedical, pharmaceutical and nutritional degree courses. Joanne has already started to collect project descriptions. An important outcome of this work is to help integrate the medicinal plants in the garden with cutting edge research in the biomedical and pharmaceutical areas of the University.
   
   
2. The Visiting Professor from China, who is an expert in medicinal plants and soft fruit, has had problems with his visa, and now plans to arrive in December 2007 and stay for a year.
   
   
3. After some discussion, we declined the National Catalpa collection currently held at Clivedon, as the material was not suitable for transfer.
   
   
4. I attended the Meeting of the European Cooperative Programme for Crop Genetic Resources Networks (ECPGR) Medicinal and Aromatic Plants working Group in Olomouc, Czech Republic in June 2007, and wrote a paper for their official report on Medicinal and Aromatic Plant (MAP) Conservation Legislation and Production in the United Kingdom.
   
   
5. With advice from Prof. Liz Williams and Dr Ann Walker, seeds of medicinal plants were obtained from botanic gardens around the world, and sown by Val Jasper and planted out by Julia Wesley. The extent of our collection of medicinal plants will only become apparent when we have them all labelled (thanks to the Friends) and an inventory made.
   
   
6. For the first time, this autumn term students of pharmacy were given practical exercises that involved the medicinal plants growing in the Harris Garden.
   
   
7. I discussed with the architect, Graham Stephens, the new campus development plan. He assured me that the Harris Garden was unaffected by any foreseeable developments.
   
   
8. Dr Julie Hawkins has been drawing up plans for a MSc course: Medicinal Plant Diversity, Conservation and Production, and the course is being scrutinised by the University system for the approval of new courses. If approved, the first students would be recruited for entry in October 2009.
   
   
9. On 29 June 2008, we plan to hold a Joint Meeting with the Herb Society. Details accompany. Friends of the Harris Garden are of course especially welcome to attend, and it would be very useful if the Garden could be open to visitors on that day, with perhaps Friends acting as guides ?
   
   
10. If the HGP is to achieve its aims of being a National Centre then we really need to attract large amounts of money for our research. To further this aim we are working with colleagues around the University, planning to examine the beneficial effects of medicinal plants on cognition and brain function in general, using approaches that embrace the complexity of the interaction between the plants and the patient.