http://www.rbge.org.uk/whats-on

RBGE Creative Programmes, Arboretum Place/Inverleith Row Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Edinburgh (2024)

08/12/2024

Ash Sounds 🎸🎶

Only one week to go until the astounding sound of ash is brought to life!

Join Chris Amer, acclaimed jazz/folk guitarist, and singer song writer Rowan Addy for beautiful compositions based around Ash Rise, including a performance on the concrete harmony guitar.

After you have immersed yourself in the sounds of Ash ask any questions you may have to Chris and Rowan in a Q&A.

🗓️ Sunday 15 December
⏰ 12 – 1:30pm
🎟️ £10 / £8 RBGE members / Staff/ Students

Book here: https://ash-sounds.eventbrite.co.uk
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🌳 Ash Rise
📅 13 Sep – 12 Jan 2025
⏰ Open daily 10am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 John Hope Gateway Gallery
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Image: Concrete Harmony guitar, Ash Rise 2024. Photo: Neil Hanna
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Scottish Furniture Makers Association
Scottish Forestry
Creative Scotland

05/12/2024

Fungi Forms Room 6: “Future”

Fungi are at the heart of all futures. As processors and problem solvers, they can clean up the environment, inspire new medicines and fabricate novel material. Explore a variety of works that showcase this in our final room.

Discover PLP’s Symbiocene Demonstrator, an installation constructed out of mycelium that demonstrates the possible future of it as a building material. Alongside this, feel the texture of Ffern packaging created from mycelium.

Julie Beeler’s “Mushroom Color Atlas” is a living study of colours derived from dyeing with mushrooms. Scroll through the atlas on an interactive screen and learn how the colours inspired the paint on our gallery walls.

Continuing to explore the room, discover Siôn Parkinson’s unique ‘Mushroom Dress’ designed by Matty Bovan. The stinkhorn mushroom inspires this dress, combining art and performance with the idea of scent to capture the fascinating essence of this unusual fungus.
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Image: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Sally Jubb.
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 Aug – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Matty Bovan
PLP Labs
Julie Beeler
Siôn Parkinson

04/12/2024

Fungi Forms: Sound and Vision

Fungi weave through human culture, inspiring designers, artists and musicians with their forms, colours, properties and even sounds.

In this room, Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen uses the idea of entanglement in the world of fungi to showcase two dresses from her 2021 Roots of Rebirth collection.

Elsewhere, artists Amanda Cobbett and Alexander Viazmensky respond to the startling colour of the fly agaric mushroom through both botanic artwork and embroidery. Fly agaric specimens from our herbarium can be seen alongside these works.

Whilst absorbing these works you can also play records by musicians who look to the fungal kingdom as an emblem of life’s interconnectedness. Put a record on and immerse yourself into the fascinating world of fungi!
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Images: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Sally Jubb.
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 Aug – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Iris van Herpen

Amanda Cobbett

Shirley Sherwood Collection

04/12/2024

📢 Last chance to see: Fungi Forms!

Don’t miss the final week of our exhibition celebrating fungi and its interconnectedness with our lives.

Through the lens of a variety of artists and mediums explore how fungi have inspired artworks and enthralled artists.

The exhibition consists of artworks from a variety of artists and makers including Stella McCartney, Simon Faithfull, Hannah Read, Alexander Viazmensky, Willoughby Arevalo and Isabelle Kirouac, Amanda Cobbett, Iris Van Herpen, Julie Beeler and RBGE’s very own Siôn Parkinson.

From heads growing fungi, to beautiful botanic art, embroidered samples of mushrooms, detailed photography and mushroom leather substitutes, there is something for everyone to explore.

The gallery is open every day until 8 December, so don’t miss your last chance to delve into the fascinating world of fungi!
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 Aug – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Image: Close up of ‘Lagniappe’ by Jo Coupe Photo: Sally Jubb
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

03/12/2024

Fungi Forms: Fact and Fiction

The fourth room you will find in Fungi Forms is Fact and Fiction. For centuries, we have woven stories around mushrooms and fungi or used them to embroider the tales we tell, reflecting our sense of wonder and sometimes our fears.

In this room you can see selections from the Botanics’ library and browse an array of fungi themed books. There are biological studies, cultural histories and works of imagination for all ages and genre tastes.

In addition to our small library, you will also find two animated films. The first, “Mycorrhizal Fungi: The Roots of Life on Land,” explores the mutually beneficial relationship between fungi and plants, featuring insights from mycologist Merlin Sheldrake. The second film, “The Mushroom Hunters,” created by Amanda Palmer, highlights women’s significant contributions to mushroom foraging, accompanied by a poem by author Neil Gaiman that reflects on the evolution of science.
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Image: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Sally Jubb.
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 Aug – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

02/12/2024

🍄Fungi Forms: Fashion👗

The third room of Fungi Forms explores Fashion. Today the fashion industry is experimenting with mycelium to develop sustainable and cruelty-free alternatives to traditional materials, particularly leather.

Fashion designer Stella McCartney has long placed environmental concerns and animal welfare at the heart of her business. Her bustier and trousers are made from Mylo™, a form of ‘unleather’ produced from mycelia. Grown in just two weeks in a vertical farming facility powered by renewable energy, it matches leather’s drape, texture and weight almost exactly.

For her spring/summer 2022 launch, McCartney collaborated with eminent mycologist Paul Stamets and biologist Merlin Sheldrake, author of ‘Entangled Life’. The fungi-inspired collection included a limited-edition handbag made from Mylo™.
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Image: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Sally Jubb.
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 Aug – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Stella McCartney

01/12/2024

Fungi Forms Gallery 2: Food and Drink

The second room in Fungi Forms is ‘Food and Drink’. Without fungi we would have little to eat or drink. No rice, corn, potatoes, bread, pasta, tea, coffee, beer or wine... without fungi there would be hardly any soil and without fungal partners the plants we consume, or feed to livestock, could not survive.

Edible fungi are celebrated by artists across the globe for their forms, flavours and scents.

In this room, you will find work by the botanical artist Alexander Viazmensky who has spent decades foraging for fungi in the woods. A key element of Viazmensky’s images is the apparent debris. This relates to where the specimen was found and evokes the biological concept of mutualism, the beneficial interaction between species.

British textile artist Amanda Cobbett has also worked extensively with fungi. Scouring forest floors, she photographs and collects mushrooms. Amanda then creates exquisite, embroidered sculptures of mushrooms and toadstools using an intricate process involving the layering of thread.

Bringing sensory fun to the exhibition is the Art & Fungi Project, aka American artists Willoughby Arévalo and Isabelle Kirouac. Scent is a clue in the identification of mushrooms, so their graphic ‘Aromatic Wheel of Fungi’ display asks visitors to apply the sniff test to a variety of specimens. What memories do these smells trigger? What words describe them? This work is ever expanding.
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Image: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Sally Jubb.
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 Aug – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Shirley Sherwood Collection

Amanda Cobbett

Art & Fungi Project

30/11/2024

Fungi Forms Gallery 1: ‘Life’

Entering the first room in Fungi Forms you are welcomed by a wall of photographs showcasing just a few of the essential species that support life in the Botanics, alongside artworks inspired the by the effects that fungi have on the cycles of life.

Our bodies are habitats for many organisms. Working in partnership with Edinburgh-based community mushroom farm Rhyze, Simon Faithfull has turned himself into a habitat for fungi. In his Biotopes series, he has made 3D prints of his own head and impregnated them with mycelia. These have grown during Fungi Forms to produce a variety of oyster mushrooms, which grow out of the head’s mouth and nose like mycological speech bubbles.

Hannah Read is an Edinburgh-born musician and composer. The Fungi Sessions Vol. 1 is a suite of songs inspired by fungi and dedicated to the memory of her father, Nick Read, a pioneering fungal cell biologist at the University of Edinburgh. Hannah’s song Silverphae is paired alongside a microscopic time-lapse video of a stinkhorn mycelium made in collaboration with mycologist Dr. Patrick Hickey.

Exploring her fascination with fungi, Jo Coupe presents Infester, bronze casts of edible beech mushrooms that typically grow on trees. They emerge from the walls here and elsewhere in the exhibition, a reminder that fungi are all around us.
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Image: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Sally Jubb.
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 August – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Rhyze Mushrooms
Simon Faithfull
Hannah Read
Patrick Hickey
Jo Coupe

25/11/2024

Ash Sounds 🎸🎶

Join us for a recital of the two musical compositions inspired by the exhibition Ash Rise.

Acclaimed jazz and folk guitarist, Chris Amer will play a composition written for Ash Rise on the guitar made for the exhibition, plus other pieces to demonstrate the sounds capable of an ash and concrete guitar.

Singer songwriter Rowan Addy will play 'Back to the Ground', her piece written for the musical score of the Ash Rise documentary film on a Taran Guitar, handmade in Fife by Rory Dowling and his workshop team.

Listen as the work in the Ash Rise exhibition comes to life, followed by a Q&A.

🗓️ Sunday 15 December
⏰ 12 – 1:30pm
🎟️ £10 / £8 RBGE members / Staff/ Students

Book here: https://ash-sounds.eventbrite.co.uk
__________

🌳 Ash Rise
📅 13 Sep – 12 Jan 2025
⏰ Open daily 10am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 John Hope Gateway Gallery
🎟️ Free exhibition
__________

Image: Concrete Harmony guitar, Ash Rise 2024. Photo: Gabriela Silveira
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Scottish Furniture Makers Association

Scottish Forestry

Creative Scotland

19/11/2024

Christmas at the Botanics 🌟

There’s not long to go now until Christmas at the Botanics is back!

This year, discover flickering candles floating high into the night sky, batons of colour-changing light dancing in time and even a beautiful light up mycelium network, fitting in perfectly with our fungal theme of the year!

To book your tickets follow the link below:

https://www.rbge.org.uk/whats-on/christmas-at-the-botanics

A reminder that during Christmas at the Botanics the gallery and garden will close early on the following dates:

Wednesday 21 November
Opening Times: 10:30am - 2:30pm (last entry 2:15pm)
Garden closing 3pm

Sunday 24 November and Wednesday 4 December
Opening Times: 10:30am – 3pm (last entry 2:45pm)
Garden closing 3:30pm

Come along and join us for the most wonderful time of the year!
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Image: Mycelium network, Christmas at the Botanics 2024.
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

16/11/2024

🍄 Join our final few Spotlight Talks for Fungi Forms!

Enjoy a series of spotlight talks led by our wonderful Creative Programmes volunteers and immerse yourself further into the world of fungi.
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📍Inverleith House

📅 Saturday 16 November
⏰14:30 – 15:00

📅 Friday 22 November
⏰11:30 – 12:00

📅 Thursday 5 December
⏰13:30 – 14:00

📅 Saturday 7 December
⏰13:30 – 14:00

🔗 Book your free spot via Eventbrite using the link below: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/fungi-forms-3429419
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Image: A volunteer delivering a talk during the Fungi Forms exhibition, September 2024. Photo: Alice Veness.
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 August – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
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Fungi Forms is supported by players of the People's Postcode Lottery, and National Lottery through Creative Scotland

15/11/2024

December Spill the Tea Tour ☕🍄

It’s our final Spill the Tea Tour of Fungi Forms! Join us for a guided tour of Fungi Forms, chat about the exhibition, and sample a cup of mushroom tea.

Guided by a member of the Botanics' Creative Programmes team, enter the fascinating world of fungi and learn about the multiple forms it takes both in life and in art.

Through music, literature, fashion, design, scent and visual art, Fungi Forms will take you on a spectacular journey, exploring fungi in science, culture and innovation. At the end of the tour, discuss what you have learnt over a cosy cup of mushroom tea!

🗓️ Sunday 1 December
⏰ 2.30pm - 3.30pm
🎟️ Book here: https://Spill-the-tea-tour-fungi-forms-4.eventbrite.co.uk
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Image: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Louise King.
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Fungi Forms

Until 8 December 2024
Open daily 10.30am - 3:30pm (last entry 3.15pm)
Inverleith House Gallery
Free exhibition
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

13/11/2024

Book Week Scotland 2024: Fungi Forms

Book Week Scotland runs from the 18 - 24 November and what better way to celebrate it than finding a cosy nook in our Fungi Forms reading room?

Nestled on the first floor in amongst the gallery spaces is the reading room, featuring comfy seats, warm lights and shelves full of fungi themed books to read during your time in the gallery.

Featuring Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Democracy of Species; Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo and Neil Gaiman’s The Mushroom Hunter there is an option for everyone to sit back and enjoy getting lost in.

And don’t forget, we are also celebrating Book Week Scotland this year with our event, Fungi Talks: Stinkhorn! To book your free ticket follow the link below:

https://FungiTalksStinkhorn.eventbrite.co.uk
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Image 1: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh library books. Photo: Sally Jubb

Image 2: The reading room in 'Fungi Forms...' Photo: Sally Jubb
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Fungi Forms
2 August – 8 Dec 2024
Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
Inverleith House
Free exhibition
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Fungi Forms is supported by players of the People's Postcode Lottery and National Lottery through Creative Scotland.

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Edinburgh Art Festival

Scottish Book Trust

Deaf Action

12/11/2024

BSL Tour: Ash Rise

Join us for a BSL tour of Ash Rise, led by Trudi Collier. Trudi is a deaf BSL user, and has been working with arts and heritage organisations since 2017 to create accessible tours and events for deaf BSL users across Scotland.

Ash Rise is a creative partnership between Scottish Furniture Makers Association, Scottish Forestry, and Association of Scottish Hardwood Sawmillers, celebrating the ash tree and highlighting the effects of ash dieback through the work of 20 outstanding contemporary makers, designers, and artists from across Scotland.

This exhibition tour is in British Sign Language (BSL). Please book your ticket in advance and meet at the entrance to the exhibition in John Hope Gateway.

To book: https://BSL-Tour-Ash-Rise.eventbrite.co.uk
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📅 Sunday 24 November
⏰ 2pm - 3pm
📍 John Hope Gateway Gallery
🎟️ £5
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Image: BSL Interpretation of Living Soil. Photo: Eva Madden.
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Scottish Furniture Makers Association
Scottish Forestry
Creative Scotland
Deaf Action
Trudi's Mindfulness for Deaf Community

10/11/2024

Descriptive tour and workshop: Fungi Forms

Don’t miss this tour which will feature an exhibition-first activation of Willoughby Arévalo & Isabelle Kirouac’s ‘Aromatic Wheel of Fungi’, inviting participants to use their sense of smell to explore the sensory properties of mushrooms.

The tour will be led by audio describer John Cummings and followed by a creative workshop inspired by the exhibition led by the artist Simon Faithfull, whose work Biotopes features in Fungi Forms.

📅 Tuesday 12 November
⏰ 10:00 – 12:15
📍 Meet at the John Hope Gateway.
🎟️ Book here: https://DescriptiveTourWorkshopFungiForms.eventbrite.co.uk

This exhibition tour is specifically designed for people with a visual impairment and can be enjoyed by anyone - blind and partially sighted people, and people without sight loss.
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🍄 Fungi Forms
📅 2 August – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
__________

Image: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Sally Jubb.
__________

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Sight Scotland

RNIB

08/11/2024

Fungi Forms artist workshop

Join international artist Simon Faithfull for a creative workshop inspired by the Fungi Forms exhibition in Inverleith House.

Simon is a British-born artist based in Berlin, whose works are exhibited extensively around the world.

Simon’s work Biotopes features in Fungi Forms, and will be explored in more depth in an audio descriptive tour of the exhibition prior to the workshop.

This dual event is not to be missed if you are a fungi and art lover!

To book: https://DescriptiveTourWorkshopFungiForms.eventbrite.co.uk
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📅 Tuesday 12 November
⏰ 10am – 12.15pm
📍 Inverleith House Gallery
🎟️ £8
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Image: Biotopes head, Fungi Forms, 2024. Photo: Alice Veness.
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Simon Faithfull
RNIB Scotland
Sight Scotland

06/11/2024

Descriptive tour and workshop: Fungi Forms

The tour will be led by audio describer John Cummings and followed by a creative workshop inspired by the exhibition. The workshop will be led by the artist Simon Faithfull, whose work Biotopes features in Fungi Forms.

📅 Tuesday 12 November

⏰ 10:00 – 12:15

📍 Meet at the John Hope Gateway.

🎟️ Book here: https://DescriptiveTourWorkshopFungiForms.eventbrite.co.uk

This exhibition tour is specifically designed for people with a visual impairment but can be enjoyed by anyone - blind and partially sighted people, and people without sight loss.
__________

🍄 Fungi Forms

📅 2 August – 8 Dec 2024
⏰ Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
📍 Inverleith House
🎟️ Free exhibition
__________

Image: Fungi Forms installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2024. Photo: Louise King.
__________

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Sight Scotland

RNIB

Simon Faithfull

03/11/2024

Book Week Scotland: Fungi Talks, Stinkhorn!

This Book Week Scotland join us to dive into the fascinating world of fungi, specifically the weird and wonderful Stinkhorn!

Celebrate the two newly published books 'Stinkhorn: How Nature's Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen' by Siôn Parkinson and 'The Fascinating World of Fungi,' edited by Max Coleman. Join us for an afternoon of conversation, discussion and unique screenings of never-before-seen footage of mycelium and stinkhorn growth by scientist Dr Patrick Hickey.

Book your free space using the link below:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fungi-talks-stinkhorn-tickets-1055065622679

Book Week Scotland runs from 18 – 24 November.

📆 Wednesday 20 Nov
⏰ 15:00 – 16:30
📍 Lecture Theatre, Science Buildings, RBGE
🎟️ Free event (booking required)
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Image 1: [left] Sion Parkinson’s 'Stinkhorn: How Nature's Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen,' published by Sternberg Press. [Right] RBGE’s Fascinating World of Fungi edited by Max Coleman. Photo: Rona Forbes.

Image 2: Sion Parkinson poses in Matty Bovan’s Stinkhorn dress in the garden. Photo: Ross Fraser McLean
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Fungi Forms
2 August – 8 Dec 2024
Open daily 10.30am - last entry 3.15pm
Inverleith House
Free exhibition
_______________

Fungi Forms is supported by players of the People's Postcode Lottery and National Lottery through Creative Scotland

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Edinburgh Art Festival

Scottish Book Trust

Deaf Action