Gardens: The Malaysian Trail is the hot new attraction at Edinburgh’s Botanics

Always a popular haunt during the cold of winter, the glasshouses have been through changes in recent months, with the instalation of a brand-new Malaysian Trail. From bananas to rare rhododendrons, the plants on this project give us a taste of South East Asia, exploring the research work of the RBGE and the ways in which these plants impact on our everyday lives.

Malaysia covers over 300,000 km² and as well as Peninsular Malaysia it includes Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo. It is renowned as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots with more than 20,000 species of flowering plants, and as such is a draw for tropical botanists like the RBGE’s Peter Wilkie. “I study tropical trees and spent time on sabbatical going round Malaysia, working with Malaysians on collecting and studying and researching trees called Sapotaceae,” he says. “Most people haven’t heard of them, but they’re important economically and ecologically. The Palaquium species, for example, exudes a natural form of rubber called Gutta Percha which is used in deep sea cables, insulation and even root canal work. Taxonomically there are a lot of undescribed species so I was spending quite a bit of time in Malaysia, trying to sort that problem out.”

On his return from Malaysia, Wilkie was asked if Malaysia’s Minister for Tourism, Dato’ Sri Dr. Ng Yen Yen, could make an unofficial visit to the Botanics. She turned out to be a plants and botanic gardens enthusiast and she and Wilkie were soon looking at potential collaborations. Following a successful one-off event at the Edinburgh International Science Festival where the culinary uses of gingers and research into this group of plants took centre stage, plans were drawn up for the interpretative trail in the glasshouses.

It features more than 600 plants from Malaysia, including hibiscus, orchids, begonias and African violets. Fascinating and colourful as these plants are, there’s no getting away from the fact that Scotland isn’t their natural home. Keeping them happy and healthy is the job of Louise Galloway, glasshouse supervisor. She too has spent time working in Malaysia and says that trying to reproduce a natural-looking habitat within a finite space when in the wild you can have tropical trees reaching 80m tall means using a bit of creative license. “Often with careful pruning we keep them looking as authentic as we possibly can,” she says. “A lot of the plants that we grow are naturally epiphytic so they’d be growing high up on the rainforest canopy and experiencing high humidity and dappled shade – that we can provide them with. Also, we create artificial trees using cork oak which acts as a really nice medium for the plant roots to grow into.”

Galloway explains that light levels can be challenging, particularly during the long Scottish winters, as tropical plants are used to 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness, no matter the time of year. “They’re still wanting to grow and many of them are flowering in our darkest winter months so we’re quite careful with our watering and we do lightly feed them. With just a bit of tweaking we can help them stay as happy and healthy as they can be,” she says. The team has developed potting and planting mixes to suit the native habitat of the plants – they can’t bring any soil back from overseas because of legislation and the risk of pests and diseases, but having seen the plants growing in the wild they can modify resources to suit the plants’ needs. “Most of our potting mixes are British-based bark products so they’re really nice and free-draining,” she says. “That’s really important – they like a lot of water but they don’t like to sit wet so it means you can give them plenty of water but they still have air around the roots.”

One of the main attractions of the Malaysian Trail is the market stall. As a producer of coffee, chocolate, tea, pepper, nutmeg and rice, Malaysia’s plants will have made their way into most of our kitchens. Fresh and dried produce on display has also included jackfruit, rambutan and the famed durian – a fruit with a smell so pungent that many cargo holders refuse to transport it. Having secured some durian for the launch event, Louise Galloway says the secret is not to smell it before you taste it. “It was very strange, to me it tasted like onions and garlic mixed with mango,” she says. “But other people have less positive ways of describing it. Still, demand has outweighed supply and we will get some more for future tasting sessions.”

The trail winds its way through seven of the ten glasshouses and of all the plants on show it’s the Vireya rhododendrons that both Wilkie and Galloway single out as being a particular highlight. “They’re not like our seasonal rhododendrons, they flower throughout the year and often they start to flower in January,” says Galloway. “They’re so diverse, from large leaved to small leaved and they come in every colour apart from blue.” RBGE has the world’s leading collection of Vireya rhododendrons, with more than 150 species and as part of the opening ceremony, Dato’ Sri Dr. Ng Yen Yen planted a Red Listed (endangered) Vireya, Rhododendron lamrialianum ssp. lamrialianum, highlighting the need to research, catalogue and protect these plants.

It’s envisaged that the Malaysian Trail will continue to evolve in the coming years, with new plants and features, and staff are already getting great feedback about it. “The nicest thing is we had some Malaysian students last week and they said that they felt at home with the sights and smells and everything,” says Galloway. “One of the rewarding things is that we try to create natural-looking landscapes and habitats and when we get that sort of feedback from people from the countries that we’re working on, then we know we’ve done our job properly.”

The Malaysian Trail is now open at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Entrance to the glasshouses costs £4.50 (concessions, £1-£3.50). For more information and opening hours, visit {www.rbge.org.uk|www.rbge.org.uk|www.rbge.org.uk