The morning began at the Kyoto Botanical Garden! High humidity, high temperatures and even higher enthusiasm. In a garden like this, there is never enough time.
Here the botanical curiosities come one after another — so many species that at home we only see struggling in pots grow here in the ground, in all their beauty. What impressed us:
🌲 The Wollemi pine — a “living fossil”, known only from fossils until 1994, when it was found alive in a canyon in Australia.
🌸 The flowering baobab — the tree from “The Little Prince”, whose flower opens for a single night.
🕊️ The dove orchid (Peristeria elata) — the national flower of Panama, which hides at its heart the perfect silhouette of a dove. An endangered species.
🎭 The Darth Vader flower, so called for its striking resemblance to the mask of the famous Star Wars character.
🌿 Metasequoia — another fossil tree, first described from fossils and only later found alive in China.
🌳 And the bonsai exhibition — the art of perseverance. In Japan, bonsai are handed down from generation to generation; they live for hundreds of years not by luck, but through uninterrupted care.
We could hardly tear ourselves away from the garden for the poster session, where we presented two VRDS Buzau papers:
📌 Phenotypic diversity in the bean collection (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) — Dr Vasilica Manea
📌 Adaptation of faba bean to water stress: variability of root traits (Vicia faba L.) — Dr Eng. Elena Barcanu Tudor
A session full of questions, exchanges of ideas and networking. A paper on the circular economy in agriculture also caught our attention: the organic substrates used in hydroponic tomato growing, considered waste, get a second life as fertiliser for spring onion crops.
Then came the closing ceremony. Tomorrow we are off on a tour! 🇯🇵
