PLANTS project

Cataloguing Scotland’s heritage plant collections

One of the joys of gardening is discovering new plants. No matter how long you have been gardening, there is always something new to catch your eye. Plant Listing at the National Trust for Scotland (PLANTS) is the biggest horticultural audit project undertaken by the Trust and aims to celebrate, protect and better understand the flora and vegetation across our gardens and designed landscapes.

Beginning in June 2022 and running until March 2025, three regionally based teams will inventory the plants within our gardens and work to update the data held in our plant records database, IrisBG. The resulting database will have taxonomy descriptions and unique object numbers for every plant collection in our 39 major gardens and designed landscapes.

Why are we carrying out this project?

The scale of this project, which will audit an estimated 100,000 items, represents a major investment in managing and preserving our plant collections.

It will have a number of significant benefits for the Trust:

• It will enable the Trust to identify collections at risk of disease, and to treat and respond quickly to outbreaks.
• It will evidence the legal and ethical sourcing of our plants.
• It will make it easier to report on nationally important plant collections and track conservation scheme material.

With this important information, we will be able to analyse the diversity of our collections so that we can plan for the future and provide reliable information to use in interpretation and visitor engagement. 

Where will the project take place?

The first phase of the project begins this summer and will see two of the regional teams (North and South-West) work across nine sites, supported by central project management, database management and administration support. One of the first visits by the North team will be to Inverewe Garden, founded by Osgood Mackenzie on what had been a bare rocky headland and then further developed by his daughter, Mairi Sawyer. Pioneers in the development of the coastal shelterbelt, they created an exotic paradise which today contains five of the Trust’s National Plant Collections™.

By contrast, Broughton House Garden is located in the closely packed streets of Kirkcudbright. This Japanese-influenced garden was developed by artist E A Hornel and his sister Elizabeth at the beginning of the 20th century. The garden boasts some magnificent specimens such as the hardy orchid Dactylorhiza ‘Tizzy Hornell’, which was named after Elizabeth herself. The South-West inventory team will head down to Broughton House later this summer.