May is flying by!

Wow how quickly the spring progresses, everything is lush and green, in a couple of weeks my garden plants seem to have grown about a metre higher!
I attended a fantastic meeting on the evolution of flowers at the Royal Society in London this week http://royalsociety.org/event.asp?id=7434, absolutely brilliant and inspiring. I have worked with one of the organisers, Peter Crane, when he was the Director at RBG Kew, and admire him immensley. He has phenominal intelligence, ability to see the BIG picture (I'm talking evolution of plants here which is a massively large subject!) and focus on the detail at the same time (I have carried out and published results of two pollen projects with him). All this while being in charge of the Gardens, he was jetting off to a different part (or parts)of the world every week, and has a family. Rumour has it that he only needed four hours sleep and was out running round the Gardens at 4am. Shame on me for thinking it is sometimes a challenge to fit dog training around work!