Praise for New Journal of Botany (and sneak preview!)

Harebell Campanula rotundifolia
Image: C. Ferguson-Smyth

BSBI is really in the media spotlight this weekend! First the Irish Times tells its readers about 50 years of BSBI in Ireland, and now Nigel Chaffey has singled out New Journal of Botany for praise! He is the editor of "that august international botanical organ" - their words, not mine! - the prestigious Annals of Botany.
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Nigel was impressed by Michael Proctor and Margaret Bradshaw's paper - the first in a planned series - on Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) examination of leaves of British sedges Carex spp. And of the illustrations, Nigel says "The images need to be seen to be properly appreciated, but the imaging of epicuticular waxes in, for example, Figure 1f attests to their high quality. Bring on Part 2!"

Ok, Nigel! I hope you will be pleased to hear that Part 2 has already been accepted for publication in New Journal of Botany 4.1, which is due to drop through your letterbox during April. And I am taking this opportunity to show you the first of four species which Claudia Ferguson-Smyth has selected to grace the brand-new cover of New Journal of Botany throughout 2014. There are three images by Claudia and a fourth by Christopher F. Carter. 

Irish & British BSBI members, Killarney, 2013
Image: M. Long

Nigel Chaffey closes his AoB post with a compliment that is particularly apt today, with the Irish Members' Conference in full swing. He says, of our recent name change - from the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) to the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) - that it "represents a new change every bit as slick as that of the WWF (which changed from World Wildlife Fund to Worldwide Fund for Nature in 1986) and which allows it to keep its abbreviation of BSBI (which is an initialism not an acronym) the same."

Michael Viney in the Irish Times also called this name change "long overdue". So, here's to the next fifty years of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland supporting botanists in Scotland and England and Wales and the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. And  also - although it may no longer be geographically correct - from the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands!