Edinburgh’s famous Royal Botanic Garden dates from 1670 when a physic garden was planted on a site no bigger than a tennis court.
The Royal Botanic Garden - popularly known as ‘The Botanics’ - now occupies a 70-acre site one mile from Edinburgh city centre, and three other gardens in different parts of Scotland. Together they have a living collection of more than 13,000 species and an herbarium with more than three million specimens.
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh publishes botanical and horticultural titles, aimed at the specialist and general reader alike. Its catalogue includes notable series on fungi and on rhododendron - the garden has been a world centre for the study of rhododendron since the early Twentieth Century.
The tennis court-sized site of the original physic garden disappeared when the North British Railway was under construction, and is now marked by a plaque at platform 11 of Edinburgh’s Waverley Station.
