00:00I'm Jane Bradley assistant editor of the Scotsman and I'm here at the Royal
00:04Botanic Gardens Edinburgh with Regis keeper Simon Milne. The gardens suffered
00:09severe storm damage in the storm Eowyn on Friday including the loss of this
00:15tree behind us which is the Himalayan cedar which was planted in 1859. Hi Simon.
00:20Hello. Could you just tell us a little bit about the impact of the storm on the
00:24gardens? Yeah it was it was disastrous in some respects. We've had huge damage to
00:31our tree collection also damaged the glass houses which makes the plants
00:36inside the glass houses vulnerable as well. So we've lost at least 15 trees in
00:42the Edinburgh garden with probably another 25 to 30 damaged as well and
00:47they'll need to be assessed and across all four gardens and the number of
00:50trees that have come down or damaged is probably at least 150. So a big impact
00:57on Scotland's national botanic collection and these trees are very
01:01special and yeah we're all heartbroken at the loss of wonderful specimens. We
01:08exist here for for conservation for research for education and when we start
01:12to lose parts of the collection then those are impacted as well. Yeah and
01:16obviously the the impact on the collection and the cost of the
01:19collection is huge but there's a huge financial cost attached to this as well
01:22isn't there? Yeah there will be and it's too early to make that assessment yet but it'll
01:26be in the hundreds of thousands particularly taking consideration the
01:29damage to buildings over in our Benmore garden, glass house completely destroyed,
01:34polytunnel gone, roofs ripped apart. So yes there's going to be a big financial
01:40cost of this. So it's a cost to the national collection and it's a
01:46cost to the finances. And to help with the costs we've launched a storm damage
01:52recovery fund which can be accessed online through our website and we're
01:57hoping that not just the local community but everybody that loves plants, loves
02:02the natural world will help us restore this amazing collection for future
02:07generations. Thank you very much Simon and you can read more about the impact
02:12of storm urine on the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and all around Scotland
02:16at Scotsman.com so please have a look at our social media on Facebook, Twitter and
02:23also if you're out and about buy a newspaper.
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