INtroduction
The Mission of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is "To explore, conserve and explain the world of plants for a better future".
RBGE maintains and develops our internationally important Library, Archive, Herbarium and Living collections in order to maximise their value as a research, education, conservation and heritage resource. Our collections enable us to deliver world-leading research focussing on plant science and conservation. Our current research includes projects in China and the Himalayan region (we worked with the Chinese Academy of Science’s Kunming Institute of Botany to develop a joint field station at Lijiang), South East Asia (including Laos, Sulawesi, Thailand and Indonesia), South America (including Brazil, Chile and Peru), New Caledonia and the Middle East (including Oman, Soqotra and the Arabian Peninsula). We also have an active research programme on the Scottish cryptogamic flora.
In addition to this core scientific research our expert curatorial, education and exhibition teams are actively involved in research and development on our collections, producing monographs, exploring issues around curation in the digital world and creating world-class public engagement and interpretation programmes. Inverleith House, the art gallery located at the heart of the Edinburgh Garden, was the home of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 1960 to 1984 and now hosts exhibitions that aim to bring together the best of contemporary art with items from our own collections. Our collections-based research interests include digitisation, citizen science, OCR in manuscripts and quantitative and qualitative methods to demonstrate the impact of collections.
Our gardens in Edinburgh, Benmore, Dawyck and Logan are first-class visitor attractions and provide opportunities to engage with a wide audience across Scotland. The Edinburgh Garden is consistently included in the top 10 most visited attractions in Scotland.