Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Four Gardens in One City

The garden RBGE now occupies is its fourth site. The Holyrood plot was outgrown within five years, and Sutherland leased ground adjoining Trinity Hospital from the Town Council in 1675, being formally appointed Intendant the following year. That site lay by the Nor’ Loch, on ground now covered by Waverley Station, and a plaque near the platforms marks it. It was not a safe home: in 1689, during the siege of Edinburgh Castle, the loch was drained for military reasons and the garden was flooded with mud. Sutherland supervised the restoration.

In 1763 John Hope consolidated the Holyrood and Trinity Hospital gardens at a cleaner site on the road to Leith, out of the Old Town’s smoke. From 1820, under the Regius Keeper Robert Graham and the curator William McNab, the whole thing moved again to Inverleith, where it remains. Shifting a fourteen-acre collection took three years, and McNab built a transplanting machine to move mature trees with minimal loss — a piece of practical Scottish engineering in the service of botany.

The Regius Keepers

James Sutherland, the self-taught gardener recruited as a youth, became the first Professor of Botany in the town’s college and published Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis in 1683, cataloguing some two thousand plants — the first botanical work published in Scotland. His royal warrant as the King’s Botanist was issued by William III on 12 January 1699, and a warrant of Queen Anne in 1710 made him the first Regius Professor of Botany for the Royal Garden. The South African medicinal genus Sutherlandia carries his name.

John Hope (Keeper 1761–1786) is arguably the most consequential of the line, and he was the fourth Keeper, not the first — an error repeated widely enough to be worth naming, and probably seeded by the John Hope Gateway of 2009. Hope secured permanent Crown funding, a precedent RBGE still cites as foundational; was an early British champion of Linnaean classification; conducted early plant-physiology experiments; taught William Roxburgh, later called the father of Indian botany; and grew some three thousand plants of Turkish rhubarb from seed obtained via St Petersburg, as a home-grown substitute for an expensive imported medicinal root. The genus Hopea is named for him.

After Hope came Daniel Rutherford (1786–1819), better known as the chemist credited with isolating nitrogen in 1772, who held the keepership for thirty-three years and began planning a new site; Robert Graham (1820–1845), who carried out the Inverleith move, obtained the Tropical Palm House of 1834, described over two hundred species for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and co-founded the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1836; John Hutton Balfour (1845–1879), a celebrated teacher of field botany; and Isaac Bayley Balfour (1888–1922), a systematist of Sino-Himalayan plants who modernised the laboratories, redeveloped the rock garden and recommended George Forrest for the expedition that made him. The line runs on to Simon Milne, the sixteenth Keeper, and Dr Julia Knights, the seventeenth and RBGE’s first female head, in post from the end of January 2026.

Plant Hunting and Its Costs

George Forrest (1873–1932) was a herbarium clerk at Edinburgh when Isaac Bayley Balfour recommended him to the Liverpool cotton broker and nurseryman A.K. Bulley, who was funding an expedition to south-west China. Between 1904 and 1932 Forrest made seven expeditions, chiefly in Yunnan, and died there in 1932. He is credited with around 1,200 species new to science and sent home more than thirty thousand herbarium numbers in multiple sets, extraordinarily rich in Rhododendron and Primula — more than fifty primula species alone — which reshaped Western gardens and gave Edinburgh taxonomy a subject it still leads.

A related myth needs pruning. Several famous plant hunters are described as RBGE men when they mostly collected for other patrons. Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) did work as a gardener at the botanic garden and was pushed into medicine by John Hope, later sailing with Vancouver and introducing the monkey puzzle to Britain, and his private herbarium is at RBGE — but he collected for Banks and others. David Douglas and Francis Masson belong to the broader Scottish plant-hunting tradition connected to Edinburgh training rather than to the institution’s own programme. Forrest is the strongest genuine link, and even he began on Bulley’s money.

The Firsts Worth Naming

Sutherland’s Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis of 1683 was Scotland’s first botanical publication. James McNab’s rock garden of 1870–71 was a genuine novelty: a garden designed for true alpines rather than an ornamental rockery, rebuilt in a more naturalistic form under Isaac Bayley Balfour around 1908–14 and now holding roughly five thousand species. The Chinese Hillside, opened in 1997, recreates a Yunnan slope and is, in RBGE’s own carefully hedged words, “perhaps one of the largest collections of Chinese plants being cultivated outside China”.

On rhododendrons, RBGE has been the major research centre since the late nineteenth century, and states that around half of all thousand known species are cultivated across its four gardens, and that it holds the world’s largest cultivated collection of Vireya rhododendrons. Its taxonomic output includes leading or co-leading the Flora of Bhutan, completed in 2002, and the continuing Flora of Nepal, with further work on Arabia and the Sino-Himalaya.

Two claims should be handled with tongs. The Temperate Palm House of 1858 is the tallest palm house in Scotland; older repetitions of “in Britain” do not match RBGE’s own current wording. And the “Edinburgh potato”, Solanum × edinense, is a naturally occurring Mexican hybrid that was growing at RBGE after the Irish famine and was formally described in 1911 by the French botanist Pierre Berthault, who named it in the garden’s honour. RBGE recreated the cross deliberately in 2018. It is a naming honour, not a Scottish invention of a blight-proof potato.

A Million Moss Dressings a Month

The garden’s most direct contribution to human lives came in 1914, when Isaac Bayley Balfour, working with the Edinburgh surgeon Charles Walker Cathcart, publicised sphagnum bog moss as a wound dressing. It is remarkably absorbent — capable of holding up to twenty-two times its own weight in liquid — and mildly antiseptic, and it grew for free across large parts of Britain and Ireland. Balfour turned RBGE’s expertise to identifying the best species, settling on Sphagnum papillosum and S. palustre.

The scale that followed was industrial. On P.G. Ayres’s research in Archives of Natural History, “by 1918 one million dressings per month were being sent out from Britain” to the war theatres. Balfour was knighted in 1920 for services in connection with the war. It is a rare case of a botanic garden’s taxonomic knowledge becoming, within months, a battlefield supply chain.

The Collections, Measured Carefully

The living collection runs to roughly 13,500 species across more than 34,000 accessions, one of the largest and richest anywhere. The herbarium holds more than three million preserved specimens of plants, fungi and algae from about 157 countries, spanning over three hundred years, with more than 55,000 type specimens; its Index Herbariorum code is E, and its oldest specimen is a Cape myrtle collected in 1697 by the ship’s surgeon Alexander Brown. The modern herbarium dates from the merger of the University and Botanical Society collections in 1839–40 and moved into its present building in 1964. By 2024 over a million specimens had been digitised; the millionth was a lichen, Stereocaulon vesuvianum, collected on Ben Nevis in 2021.

Two figures need attribution rather than repetition. RBGE says the herbarium “represents two thirds of the world’s flora” — a statement about taxonomic coverage, not specimen numbers. And while three million specimens is a world-class holding, it is not among the very largest: Kew holds around seven million, and Paris and New York are also bigger. The library and archive, meanwhile, is Scotland’s national reference collection for botany and horticulture, with over 70,000 books, 150,000 periodicals and more than a million items in total.

A Statutory Body with Four Gardens

RBGE runs four gardens: Edinburgh at Inverleith, some seventy acres and the headquarters; Benmore in Argyll, the first regional garden, involvement beginning in 1925 and the estate gifted by the Younger family around 1929–30; Logan in Dumfries and Galloway from 1969, warmed by the Gulf Stream; and Dawyck in the Borders, acquired in 1978 with formal accession dated 1979, gifted by the Balfour family. Together they draw roughly a million visitors a year.

Governance rests on the National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1985, which established a Board of Trustees and moved the garden out of direct government management. RBGE is now an executive non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government, funded by grant-in-aid through the Environment and Forestry Directorate, and a Scottish charity, SC007983. By statute the Board has between five and nine unpaid members appointed by Scottish Ministers for terms of up to five years, and the Regius Keeper serves as chief executive and Accountable Officer. Revenue grant-in-aid was about £11.7 million in 2024/25, against £11.5 million the year before, alongside capital grants of £17.0 million largely for the Edinburgh Biomes glasshouse restoration; total Scottish Government funding for that year was reported at roughly £28.5 million.

Timeline

1. Late 1667

   A small physic garden of about forty feet square

   Sibbald and Balfour obtain ground in the Abbey North Yards

2. 1670

   The larger garden is formally established near Holyroodhouse

   The date RBGE uses; 800–900 plants gathered quickly

3. 1672

   Sir Patrick Murray's private collection arrives

   Moved from Livingston Peel after his death in 1671

4. 1675–1676

   The garden moves to Trinity Hospital

   On ground now under Waverley Station; Sutherland made Intendant

5. 1681

   The Royal College of Physicians is founded

   By the same two men — eleven years after the garden

6. 1683

   Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis published

   Sutherland's catalogue of some 2,000 plants; Scotland's first botanical book

7. 1689

   The Nor' Loch is drained during the siege of the Castle

   The garden is flooded with mud; Sutherland restores it

8. 12 Jan 1699

   Sutherland's royal warrant as King's Botanist

   Signed by William III; the first Regius Keeper

9. 1763

   John Hope consolidates the gardens at Leith Walk

   Away from Old Town smoke, with permanent Crown funding secured

10. 1820–1823

    The move to Inverleith

    Robert Graham and William McNab; McNab invents a tree-transplanting machine

11. 1834

    The Tropical Palm House

    Funded under Graham, who also co-founded the Botanical Society in 1836

12. 1839–1840

    The modern herbarium is formed

    University and Botanical Society collections merge

13. 1858

    The Temperate Palm House

    The tallest palm house in Scotland

14. 1870–1871

    James McNab's rock garden

    Designed for true alpines rather than as an ornamental rockery

15. 1904–1932

    George Forrest's seven Yunnan expeditions

    Recommended by Isaac Bayley Balfour, sponsored by A.K. Bulley

16. 1914–1918

    Sphagnum moss surgical dressings

    A million dressings a month leaving Britain by 1918

17. 1929 / 1969 / 1978–79

    Benmore, Logan and Dawyck join

    The three regional gardens

18. 1985

    National Heritage (Scotland) Act

    A Board of Trustees replaces direct government management

19. 1997

    The Chinese Hillside opens

    A recreated Yunnan hillside at Inverleith

20. 2024

    The millionth specimen digitised

    A lichen collected on Ben Nevis in 2021

Did You Know?

• Sibbald's own memoir describes the first garden as “ane inclosure of some 40 foot of measure every way”.
• The garden's second site is now under Waverley Station, marked by a plaque near the platforms.
• When the Nor' Loch was drained during the 1689 siege of the Castle, the garden was buried in mud.
• William McNab invented a machine to move mature trees for the three-year shift to Inverleith.
• John Hope grew about 3,000 Turkish rhubarb plants from seed sent via St Petersburg, to replace an expensive import.
• Daniel Rutherford, who isolated nitrogen, ran the garden for thirty-three years.
• The oldest herbarium sheet is a Cape myrtle collected in 1697 by a ship's surgeon.
• The millionth specimen digitised, in 2024, was a lichen picked on Ben Nevis three years earlier.

Honest Caveats

1670 is an official date, not a tidy one. There was a 1667 garden, and the institution is a consolidation of several early gardens.

The College did not found the garden. Same founders, but the garden came eleven years first.

Hope was the fourth Keeper. Sutherland was first, in 1699.

The herbarium claims need attribution. “Two thirds of the world’s flora” is RBGE’s own phrase about coverage, and larger herbaria exist at Kew, Paris and New York.

The palm house is Scotland’s tallest, not Britain’s.

The plant hunters were not all RBGE’s. Menzies, Douglas and Masson largely collected for other patrons; Forrest was recommended by RBGE but paid by Bulley.

The collecting was imperial in context and depended on uncredited local knowledge, particularly in China. That belongs in the account, not in a footnote.

Minor dates differ between sources: the second-site lease (1675 or 1676), the Inverleith move’s completion (1820 to 1823) and Dawyck’s accession (1978 or 1979). Staff, species and visitor figures drift year to year.