Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 17, 2016

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is a scientific centre for the study of plants, their diversity and conservation, as well as a popular tourist attraction. Originally founded in 1670 as a physic garden to grow medicinal plants, today it occupies four sites across Scotland &mdash; Edinburgh, Dawyck, Logan and Benmore &mdash; each with its own specialist collection. The RBGE's living collection consists of more than 13,302 plant species, (34,422 accessions) whilst the herbarium contains in excess of 3 million preserved specimens. The Edinburgh site is the main garden.

The Edinburgh botanic garden was founded in 1670 at St. Anne's Yard, near Holyrood Palace, by Dr. Robert Sibbald and Dr. Andrew Balfour. It is the second oldest botanic garden in Britain after Oxford's. The plant collection used as the basis of the garden was the private collection of Sir Patrick Murray, 2nd Lord Elibank, moved from his home at Livingston Peel in 1672 following his death in September 1671. The original site proved too small, and in 1676 grounds belonging to Trinity Hospital were leased by Balfour from the City Council: this second garden was sited just to the east of the Nor Loch, down from the High Street. In 1763, the garden's collections were moved away from the city's pollution to a larger "Physick Garden" on the west side of Leith Walk, as shown in Ainslie's 1804 map. In the early 1820s under the direction of the botanist Daniel Ellis and several others, the garden moved west to its present location as the "New Botanic Garden" adjacent to Inverleith Row. The Temperate Palm House, which remains the tallest in Britain to the present day, was built in 1858.