Yesterday was a very enjoyable and productive day working with our partners at The Eden Project. Hettie (Team leader for the tropical biome) put together a great program of meetings to help plan future collaborations, and we were also joined by Andrew Barker our partner from the Dyson Foundation.

We started the day with Hettie and Mike Maunder (Director of Life Sciences) where students James Stewart and Jess Buckle could share their ideas for the future.  We have a common passion to support education, plants and conservation in tropical Africa and I am sure that we can help each to make a difference in the future.

We also met Commercial Manager Tracy Smith and Jess presented our new orchid seedling product ‘Orchids in a Bag’. We will be selling orchid seedlings again from the Eden Shop from the autumn (More information next month from the student team working on this project)

James has been working hard to develop our RaspberryPi based remote sensing solution to data and image collection and sharing in tropical environments and after a long and productive meeting with fellow electronics enthusiast Michael Cutler (Horticultural Technical Engineer) the first trials of the system in Eden will start next term.

We finished with a working lunch with all the tropical biome team discussing Hettie’s exciting plans for new orchid hot spots. We will be hosting a visit by the team to Mendip in late September to move plans forward and for Mendip and Writhlington students to provide a day a of orchid workshops including microprop in our great facilities.

We have been working with staff at Eden since 2002 and I am delighted that, thanks to the possibilities offered by opening Mendip Studio School, our collaborations are expanding in scope and impact both at Eden and for students at both Mendip and Writhlington.