21st October is Apple Day, an autumn holiday created by the charity Common Ground in 1990 to celebrate and protect the rich variety of apple cultivars across the…
In the forests of central Africa there is an amazing species of tree. It is called Gilbertiodendron dewevrei. Fortunately, the people who live there have shorter names for…
Geography, and particularly climate, have distinguished the extreme western parts of Scotland from the rest of the country for thousands of years. Many of our rarest plant species…
September 2019, perhaps predictably, followed the pattern of previous months this summer. Once again it was both sunnier (141.4 hours, 129% of average) and wetter (79.4 mm, 161%…
It seems that each year we uncover more serious deterioration of our ageing infrastructure which requires immediate action to ensure the safety of the Living Collection but also…
Autumn is a time of change, the leaves are starting to turn shades of yellow, orange and red. However, one plant steals the show and is of significant…
This week (7th-13th October 2019) is Scotland’s Climate Week, which this year comes at a decisive time for our planet, its people and its biodiversity. As UN Secretary-General…
As a life-long lover of insects, I jumped at the opportunity to volunteer at the Microsulpture exhibition at the Inverleith House Gallery at the Botanics . I had…
Summer 2019 seems to have been following a pattern, for August 2019, like July, was a month when both sunshine (201.7 hours, 179% of average) and rainfall (140.8…
The kirkyard at Fortingall in Perthshire has, for several centuries, been a magnet for tourists with an arboricultural bent – for the sake of its ancient yew. This…
Situated beneath the Memorial to the members of staff at RBGE who gave their lives during the First World War is a smaller, but no less poignant memorial…
The current, unprecedented scale of fire in the Amazon, the largest area of tropical rainforest in the world, a biodiversity hotspot, and a crucial resource in the fight…
Sometimes, an exhibition comes along that offers me a whole new appreciation of something that I normally take for granted. Inverleith House’s summer exhibition – Microsculpture – does…
The Edinburgh potato is a small piece of the Garden’s historical association with food crops and food security dating back to the time of our Regius Keeper Sir…
On 13 May 2019, Alan Crawford, one of the wildlife photographers that regularly visit the Garden, photographed an unusual insect and identified it as being an alderfly. There…
This is a truly invasive species, Tropaeolum ciliatum has romped over and swamped surrounding herbaceous plantings in the border to the north of the Terrace café with its…