Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Edinburgh

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is a living scientific collection as well as a place to explore. Its story begins in 1670, when Robert Sibbald and Andrew Balfour established a physic garden for medicinal plants. The Edinburgh garden now forms the headquarters of an organisation devoted to plant diversity and conservation, with related gardens at Dawyck, Logan and Benmore.

The scale of the collection is remarkable: nearly 273,000 individual plants represent around 13,300 species from around the world. Beyond the living plants, the herbarium preserves more than 3 million specimens. The garden is also turning that vast archive into a digital resource, making images available to students, scientists and plant enthusiasts across the globe.

The one millionth specimen digitised was a lichen collected from Ben Nevis in 2021. The present Edinburgh site dates from the early 1820s, when the garden moved west to its current location. Its Temperate Palm House, built in 1858, remains the tallest in Scotland.

The garden also preserves a cottage moved brick by brick from its original Leith Walk site, with that project completed in 2016. This is a place where medicinal history, global plant life and active conservation meet in the same landscape.