100s Of Rare And Threatened Trees Survived Decades Of Weather In Scottish Sites; They Didn't Survive Last Month's Storm

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.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/08/kew-rescue-mission-arborists-head-to-scotland-after-hundreds-of-trees-and-plants-felled-by-storm-eowyn