Edinburgh's Royal Botanical Gardens

We tacked on 2-3 days for exploring Edinburgh after our trip, and our first stop was the Royal Botanical Gardens.  This time we were staying at a B&B right in Edinburgh, just south of the new Scottish Parliament buildings.  Thus we could take a quick taxi north to the gardens, entering by this shiny rock garden gate rather than the main entrance.

We'd been here before at the end of our very first trip to look at gardens in England, so we knew what we wanted to see.  We were after the rock garden and the alpine garden especially.

The rock garden is something else to see, rolling knolls and small valleys now covered in a collection of mature shrubs and flowers.  It was drizzling the day we visited, that constant Scottish smirr that left this garden looking a thousand shades of green rather than colourful.

Mrs. F.G. herself was very colourful that day!

Walking through the beautiful grove of specimen trees toward the main greenhouses we passed a Tulip tree with a bloom so low I could get a photo.  It really does look like a Tulip bloom in shape.

Of course there were a few Monkey Puzzle trees, one of those unusual trees brought back by the early plant collectors as they roamed the globe.  Monkey Puzzle trees are native to Chile and also known as Chilean Pine.

Shortly we found ourselves in front of the original greenhouse, the Palm House.  Outside, lying on the ground, was this truly ancient fossilized tree older than the dinosaurs that I wanted to see.  It's another earthcache.

Inside were all manner of tropical plants including this one, but we didn't stay long; we were headed for the alpine garden.

The alpine garden is hemmed in by this beautiful flat rock wall, teeming with plants hanging down over the edge or out of crevices.

Ironically, for they are certainly hardy plants, native to high elevations of mountains around the world, alpine plants need protection from the wet Scottish winters and from summer heat. so some of them must be grown in greenhouses.

The alpine garden in Edinburgh is a world renowned collection of mostly tiny alpine plants, some protected in the greenhouse, other growing in the open, many of them in small troughs.

Of all the gardens we've visited in Europe, this one provided the most specific ideas we brought home.  Mrs. F.G. was the plant collector, and had already been building troughs, but I did the grunt work as the undergardener at our previous house.  From this Edinburgh garden I brought home the idea of developing a scree garden, with mostly alpine plants that would survive in southern Ontario.  And it became one of my favourite little patches of unusual plants in our garden.