Seventy acres and a Victorian glasshouse range, free to walk into, twenty minutes north of the New Town.
Founded in 1670 as a physic garden near Holyrood, making it the second-oldest botanic garden in Britain after Oxford, and moved to its present 70-acre site at Inverleith in the 1820s. It is a serious scientific institution — it holds around three million preserved specimens and runs conservation programmes worldwide — that also happens to be one of the pleasantest places in Edinburgh.
Entry to the garden is free.
The glasshouses
Ticketed, and the one part you pay for. The Temperate Palm House of 1858 is the tallest Victorian palm house in Britain at 23 metres. The range runs through ten climate zones — tropical, arid, montane, a wet-tropics house with a pond of giant waterlilies.
A major restoration project has meant sections closing in rotation for several years; check what is open before you make the glasshouses your main reason for coming.
The garden
The Rock Garden is the outstanding feature, built up over a century with alpine and Himalayan plants on constructed screes and outcrops. Around 5,000 species.
The Chinese Hillside, opened in 1997, holds the largest collection of Chinese wild-origin plants outside China — the institution has a long-standing collecting relationship with Yunnan and the plants here were grown from seed with recorded wild provenance.
The Woodland Garden, the Queen Mother’s Memorial Garden, and a substantial rhododendron collection which is the reason to come in late April and May.
Inverleith House, a Georgian villa in the middle, shows contemporary art exhibitions and is free.
The view
From the lawn on the south-eastern side, the ground rises just enough to give a clear view across Stockbridge and the New Town to the Old Town ridge, with the castle at one end and Arthur’s Seat behind. It is a well-known local spot and largely unknown to visitors.
Practicalities
Free, open daily, closing earlier in winter. There are two entrances — the West Gate on Arboretum Place with the visitor centre and parking, and the East Gate on Inverleith Row, which is closer to the bus stops from town.
Cafés at both ends. It is a twenty-five-minute walk from Princes Street through Stockbridge, which is a good way to do it — market, then garden, then the Water of Leith walkway back.
More Parks & Outdoors
Arthur's Seat and Holyrood Park
An extinct volcano 251 metres high, inside the city, with an Iron Age fort on it and a climb that takes forty minutes.
Princes Street Gardens
A drained loch turned into a valley garden, with a railway hidden in the bottom of it and the castle rising straight out of one side.