Qualla: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prashanthns, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1670, two Edinburgh physicians enclosed forty square feet of ground next to Holyrood Palace and planted somewhere between eight and nine hundred medicinal herbs. They needed the plants to teach apothecaries and treat patients - botany was still mostly a medical discipline - and they could not get reliable supplies any other way. From that small physic garden grew the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, which today spreads across seventy acres a mile north of the city centre and holds more than 13,000 species. It is the second-oldest botanic garden in Britain, beaten only by Oxford, and its three million herbarium specimens travel the world by digital scan to researchers in 157 countries.

Image: Prashanthns | CC BY-SA 4.0

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Four Sites, Four Climates

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian McNeil, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Edinburgh garden could not grow everything Scotland might want to grow. So over the twentieth century, the Royal Botanic Garden acquired three regional gardens, each with a climate the main site lacks. Benmore, on the wet west coast, became a regional garden in 1929 - its ave...

Image: Brian McNeil | CC BY-SA 3.0

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Moved by a Drained Loch

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. The garden has occupied four different sites in Edinburgh during its 355 years. The first, at St Anne's Yard near Holyrood, proved too small. In 1676 the operation moved to a second site east of the Nor Loch - the long marshy lake that filled what is now Princes Street Gardens. T...

Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: The Glasshouses and Inverleith

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Temperate Palm House, built in 1858, remains the tallest in Scotland - a soaring iron-and-glass structure designed to give palms the headroom they refuse to forgive. The Edinburgh garden is locally just "the Botanics," and locals walk it the way other cities walk waterfronts....

Image: Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Three Million Specimens, Digitised

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lokal_Profil, CC BY-SA 3.0. The herbarium - the scientific archive of pressed and preserved plants - holds more than three million specimens collected over centuries from 157 countries. For most of that time, accessing a specimen meant travelling to Edinburgh. Now RBGE is photographing them all at high reso...

Image: Lokal_Profil | CC BY-SA 3.0