'Excited and relieved' - Edinburgh Palm Houses re-open after 5 years as a glorious future grows

Mr Knott, who has over 45 years experience in Scottish horticulture and has worked at RBGE for 16 years, has been visiting the Palm Houses since he was a baby and has now overseen a five year refurbishment which has required the careful storage and subsequent reinstallation of hundreds of species of plants.

“I apparently learned to walk here in the Palm Houses and I never thought I’d be back here doing what I'm doing now,” he says. “It's the smell of the Palm House I remember from being a child rather than the plants themselves.”

He said he was “excited and relieved” to be back in the Palm House, which opens its doors to the public today.

“It seems a long time since the Palm Houses were actually closed, but we’ve been working on the project since way back in 2012,” he said. “The structural work was quite a specialist project which took three years, then we got the building back at the tail end of last year and started to move some of the larger plants back on a trial basis.

“The challenge for us has been to move extremely tall plants through an extremely small door and for plants that are growing vertically, to have to move them horizontally. Then we had to reverse that process to bring the plants back in and the end product you see today is the skill and expertise of the horticulture team which has undertaken that work.

The number of plants in the Palm House has been reduced from 800 to 600, with some species unable to survive the move.

“We’ve hopefully given the plants we’ve brought back in more space to grow,” he said. “That’s one of the joys of working with plants that they do have the habit of growing and through time, they’ll hopefully fill the space.”

One plant, the 200-year-old famed sabal palm, which had been almost touching the top of the Palm House roof before the restoration, had to be removed, but “offspring” of the plant, grown from seeds ten years ago, when the renovations were in their early planning stages, have been installed.

“There is a small plant of the sabal over there and the sabal itself became quite a poignant legacy of the whole project,” says Mr Knott. “We’ve been planning this for some time.”

A tribute to the sabal palm was created by artist in residence Karine Polwart, whose resulting performance, Windblown, was named the best production of last year by Scotland’s theatre critics.

“I think it was the poignancy of removing that very elderly palm tree, the sabal, and we now have a young plant planted which hopefully will last another 200 years,” says Mr Knott.

“I think to get the Palm Houses back and get them planted, it’s been quite a long process, but hopefully people will see it’s been well worthwhile. We’ve had a number of smaller openings and we’ve been very pleasantly surprised that the people who’ve been allowed to come back in after the five year period, how excited they are to get back in and how much they’ve enjoyed the space.”

The Palm House is entirely sold out for its opening weekend.

“We’re thrilled that so many of our visitors have wanted to book in advance to visit the Palm Houses,” says regius keeper Professor Julia Knights. “It feels so exciting to be welcoming back our visitors after five painstaking years of restoration. So many of our visitors in Edinburgh known the Palm Houses very well and we hope they’ll enjoy it.”

During the project, 5,700 panes of glass were replaced, while 600m2 of ironwork was fully restored and updated and 500m2 of sandstone repairs were completed with replacement stones weighing up to a quarter of a tonne.

Featuring the tallest traditional stone-built Palm House in the world, stories of the plants inside will be shared through a new visitor experience which will include innovative multimedia and multisensory digital tours.

Professor Knights says each pane has been replaced with “more climate resilient glass” which can cope with strong winds.

“It’s been a huge feat of restoration,” she says. “Because it’s a listed historic building, we’ve had to do everything absolutely right. For the very first time, we’ve opened up the tropical Palm House and the temperate Palm House and made it one big, beautiful cathedral-like space just for temperate plants, particularly our lovely ferns and palms, many of which are extinct in the wild.

The renovated Palm Houses are a vital refuge for a number of other rare and endangered species of plants from across the globe.

The opening of the Palm Houses was marked by the planting of the endangered lion plant, also known as valdivia gayana, from Chile, by The Scottish Government’s cabinet secretary for climate action, Gillian Martin.

Seeds for the lion plant were collected from a cave in Chile to help save the species, which has fewer than five natural populations in the wild, with the specimens growing at the Botanics thought to be the only ones in cultivation.

Other examples of rare plants on display in the Palm House include the Three Kings vine from New Zealand, one of the rarest plants in the world, and the Catkin yew, a critically endangered conifer.

Ranked among the top four botanic garden worldwide for research and living collections, RGBE has 120 scientists working in laboratories and in the field. It was founded in 1670 as a physic garden to train medical students and now has a collection comprising of a herbarium of 3 million specimens, a living collection of 13,500 plant species, and a library and archive of rare books, paintings, photography and art related to Botany.

One feature of the Palm House which has not been changed in the restoration is the Victorian-era Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder mounted on the roof, which takes daily measurements of how much the sun has shone in the previous 24 hours.

A solid crystal ball, measuring 10cm in diameter, sits in a metal cradle and focusses the sun’s rays onto a photosensitive card. As the sun shines, the concentrated light burns its trace onto the card, using the same technology as when it was first installed in the 1800s.

The recorder was stored away during the construction work on the Palm House, but has now been restored.

“It’s simple, but it works,” says RBGE communications manager Suzie Huggins.