For more than a century, whenever winter came to Scotland, they stood tall against the wind and rain and snow. But last month, battered by Storm Éowyn, hundreds of rare and historic trees in the living collection of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh were lost.
The charity has four sites in Scotland. Its tallest tree in Edinburgh, a 166-year-old Himalayan cedar, fell during Éowyn’s gusts of up to 80mph, while Benmore Botanic Garden on the west coast has suffered “unimaginable” devastation.
About 300 trees in Benmore’s 48-hectare (120-acre) mountainside site in Argyll have been destroyed, the charity said, and a further 142 are damaged, including a giant redwood – a 50-metre specimen planted in 1863 – that was almost snapped in half.
Many of the trees that fell crashed on to other rare and threatened species, and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh estimates that more than 700 plants were damaged during the storm, including rare rhododendrons and a treasured collection of star magnolias that came from each of the four places in the world where they still grow in the wild.
In Dawyck, the charity’s 26-hectare site on the Scottish Borders, at least 50 trees are known to have been lost during the storm, forcing the garden – which is home to some of the oldest and tallest trees in Britain – to remain closed for safety reasons.
This week, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London is preparing to send a team of four highly skilled arborists to Scotland to help the clean-up operation, assess damaged trees and remove dangerous hanging branches and fallen trunks from Benmore and Dawyck.
The charity expects that repairing the “devastating” damage of the storm could cost as much as £1m and has launched a public appeal for donations.
David Knott, curator of the living collection at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, said: “The scale and the extent of the damage at Benmore – unless you see it – is quite unimaginable. And as for the clean-up operation, this is not going to take days, weeks or even months. This is going to take years.”
Knott said Éowyn was the worst storm in living memory to hit Benmore. He has no doubt such extreme weather is linked to the climate emergency. “In Edinburgh, we’ve hit our windiest, wettest, coldest, driest and warmest records in the last 15 years.”
The longer-term challenge for botanic gardens is how to become more resilient to such extreme weather, while continuing to conserve plants in the wild that are endangered by the warming planet.
New trees at Benmore may have to be planted in more sheltered locations and the historic, non-native conifers that fell may be replaced with a more resilient native species, like sessile oaks which “were quite adept at shedding branches rather than whole trees being blown out”, Knott said. Exotic trees like gingko and metasequoia, which thrive in southern England but have struggled in Edinburgh, are also an option. “We’re expecting to have a climate quite similar to London by 2050 to 2080.”
after newsletter promotion
Tom Fry, arboricultural supervisor at Kew Gardens, has also been planting new tree species which will cope with a hotter climate. “We recently made a collection trip to Georgia and the Caucasus, because their climate aligns with Kew’s predictions about our climate in the future.” Quercus macranthera, commonly known as the Caucasian oak, and field maple were among the species collected for planting at Kew, he said.
Fry is among the arborists heading to Scotland, where he is hoping to learn lessons he can bring back to Kew about how to prevent storm damage. The London garden’s 11,000 trees were regularly inspected and assessed for structural weaknesses, particularly after storms, but high winds were becoming more frequent, forcing it to close more often than it used to for safety reasons, he said.
“We’ve had some pretty large failures of trees in recent winds – though nothing on the scale of what they’ve had in Scotland. But we understand how hard it is, how emotional, it can be to lose these specimens.”
Working at a botanic garden, he said, “you become like a custodian of the trees. You become attached to them. So when something as devastating as this happens, it sends shockwaves through you. I feel grateful I’ve got the opportunity to help.”
Knott said he was looking forward to the arrival of the Kew arborists and getting to work on repairing the damage. “When people rally around you in adversity, it gives you resilience and it gives you hope. And we need that when we look to the future.”
