Edinburgh Gardens

For Rachel’s first day in Edinburgh, we decided to visit the Royal Botanic Garden!

It was a relatively short walk, so we left the bicycles aside. Walking was complicated though by Rachel’s shoes: The ones she’d had shipped to the hotel turned out to be too small. She tried to wear them anyway, hoping they might expand a bit, but they didn’t, and the walking rendered them un-returnable. Drat!

The weather was typically Scottish. Middle of summer but there was rain, mixed with the constant threat of rain, switching hour-by-hour. Nevertheless we enjoyed the walk.

The garden was founded in 1670 at St. Anne’s Yard, near Holyrood Palace, making it the second oldest botanic garden in the UK after Oxford’s. It moved around a bit, and about 150 years later it came to its present location, and about 50 years later the “Temperate Palm House” building was constructed, which is that building you see in most of the advertisements and search results of the place.

That building was closed when Rachel and I visited, but there was still a whole lot to enjoy, starting with the rock garden:

The garden has a massive “herbarium”: A collection of preserved plant specimens, somewhere above 3 million, the vast majority accumulated this century. It’s in the process of taking hi-res digital photos of all of them, so students and scientists can get access without putting on nine layers of clothing and hearing bagpipe music.

The grounds cover 70 acres, but we moved at a slow walking pace most of the time. How else you gonna enjoy a garden? We saw a few things we knew from back home – including a Giant Sequoia – and a lot of plants that looked similar to stuff back in California but were actually collected from some distant part of the planet.

Between this garden and its satellite “regional” gardens, there are over 13 thousand species of plants currently being grown. That’s a lot of horticulture.

A structure known as Inverleith House serves as a museum on the grounds, and there was a cool walk-through exhibit on textiles and dyes, assembled from the work of multiple artists.

The exhibit was also about how these things – dyes and textiles – are inextricable from the history of colonialism, and how its perpetrators ransacked local ecologies and violently stamped out local cultures in the name of enrichment back home.

It’s a sobering thought, that evils that helped build and stock the original gardens and much of the current collection, remain threaded – literally – into our food, clothing, labor, and environmental systems. The choices we make – the ways we source things – even as humble individuals, can make a difference.

Just outside the building we found a charming little fountain as well, with Bonus Fowl:

There was a garden that looked more production-oriented than the others, with flowers and little sour apples. In our ramblings we weren’t sure if it was the Queen Mother Memorial Garden, or the Scottish Heath Garden. The weather brightened up just while we were there.

I’ve been through working gardens that were part of an exhibition before, in different places, and one of the things I find most charming about them is there are (almost) never any actual gardeners there doing the hard work of maintaining them. So you get to wander through and love the plants and the neat rows and irrigation without thinking about how labor-intensive it is.

Contrast this with your own garden back home, if you’re lucky enough to have the space for one: Everything you look at is a reminder of some task you’re ignoring. Weeding, pest control, erosion control, fertilizing…

There was one laborer we were happy to see though. A local pest control specialist:

Later in the day we wandered through some more indoor exhibits, and the cafeteria. It was neat to see some of the preserved specimens hauled out for display. I could almost picture the scientists in waistcoats and monocles squinting at them 150 years ago and declaring “Oh I say!” or whatnot.

In the late afternoon we moseyed back the way we’d come, taking a slightly different route to see more of the quaint lived-in city detail.

Then in the evening, it was time for Scottish cuisine!

Still so much exploring to do. We agreed that at some point in our visit, we should hang out here, because, well, dykes!