KEW Gardens has dispatched a team of arborists to support the rebuilding efforts at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens.
The announcement was made yesterday as a team of four arborists from Kew Gardens in London gear up to travel to the Scottish capital this week.
The Royal Botanics in Edinburgh suffered terrible damage at the hands of Storm Éowyn with Scotland’s tallest tree amongst the casualties.
Hundreds of trees across all four sites were destroyed along with glass houses and other plant species.
The rebuilding effort promises to be a monumental task, with severe damage estimated to take a long time and a lot of money to repair.
Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic gardens launched a fundraiser to assist with the rebuild last week, quickly gathering nearly £100,000 in donations.
It is estimated that the cost of repairing the damage caused by storm Eowyn could be a whopping £1m.
Winds of up to 80mph damaged trees and structures at four locations with an estimated 700 plants destroyed.
The Kew Gardens arborists will assist with the rebuild but will also aim to learn lessons on preventing storm damage.
It is widely assumed that the extreme weather of Storm Éowyn is a result of climate change with more extreme weather events expected in the future.
Botanic garden staff both at Kew Gardens and the Edinburgh Royal Botanics are now working to prevent further storm damage in the future.
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.
“As for the clean-up operation, this is not going to take days, weeks or even months. This is going to take years.”
