INtroduction

Our mission at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is to explore, conserve and explain the world of plants for a better future.

We care for an extensive Living Collection, and Preserved Collections comprising the Library, Archive and Herbarium. These are working collections curated to maximise their value for biodiversity science and conservation, education, and heritage.

The Herbarium collection is rich in plants and fungi from Scotland, as well as significant collections from Asia, where we continue to work actively in the Himalayan Region and in China, including a jointly-developed field station at Lijiang with the Chinese Academy of Science’s Kunming Institute of Botany. We also have active research partnerships throughout Southeast Asia (including Laos, Sulawesi, Thailand and Indonesia), South America (including Brazil, Chile and Peru), the Middle East (including Oman, Soqotra and the Arabian Peninsula), and Africa (Congo, South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Madagascar) all of which are reflected in our collections.

RBGE is renowned for innovations in the curation of digital collections, as we work to complete digitisation of the Herbarium. Among our collections-based research interests are digital identifiers and linking digital collections, citizen science, OCR-mediated data capture and automated plant identification.

The Plant Humanities programme brings together interdisciplinary approaches to recontextualise our collections in the context of reestablished or entirely new connections. Inverleith House, the 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 of exciting contemporary art with items from our 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.

Cover image: © Eilidh Cameron