Holyrood barks up £6,000 trees

Landscape architects have chosen mature red oaks for the site, in keeping with Enric Miralles’s vision for a parliament inspired by the Scottish countryside.

But there are no commercially grown red oaks in Scotland tall enough for the project, forcing the architects to turn to Germany at a total cost of 240,000.

The 20ft high trees, all between 15 and 20 years old, will be dug out of commercial forests in Bavaria, put on the backs of lorries and transported the 700 miles to Edinburgh.

The revelation has enraged MSPs who said the cost was "crazy", while environmentalists claimed the trees would suffer from the move.

The red oaks will form a crucial element of the landscaping that will stretch from the parliament building into nearby Holyrood Park. They are native to Scotland and look spectacular in autumn, when the leaves turn red, yellow or brown. If treated carefully, they could last up to 300 years.

A Holyrood project insider said: "The plan is for about 40 red oaks which will be among a large number of plants and shrubs for the landscaping. We want to have species which are native to Scotland and to have trees which are already substantially grown. We want them to look good."

Another source close to the project confirmed that the trees would have to be imported from Germany.

"We are spending 6,000 per tree to source them from the south of Germany. In all it’s going to cost about 240,000 to bring them in," he said.

While Scotland’s forests have been booming in recent years, trees grown at Scottish tree nurseries are too small to be worth transplanting for large-scale landscaping projects.

A Scottish tree industry source said: "For a project like this they will want a tree that looks almost fully grown, maybe 15 or 20 years old. You cannot get that in Scotland. The trees sold from our tree nurseries will be much smaller.

"The buying of large trees which look fully grown is becoming big business for all kinds of developments like shopping areas and business parks, and 6,000 is more or less the going rate, although it might seem steep. " But Callum Macdonald - a Skye-based forester - said: "I find it hard to believe they could not have found what they were looking for in Scotland, even if they would have had to make do with smallish saplings, they could have avoided having to import trees from abroad.

"It’s not good for the tree to import a mature tree from another country. The tree will have adapted itself to the soil where it came from and its original climate, and these will be quite different even between Scotland and Germany. It’s a very bad idea."

The revelation has increased concern over the spiralling cost of the whole project. Despite initial pledges that the Scottish parliament would cost 40m, the cost has soared to over 280m.

Margo MacDonald, a Lothians list MSP and a critic of the soaring cost of the Holyrood project, said: "This is just crazy. It seems they think they can do whatever they like. They have no budget to work from. This is typical of the very questionable judgment displayed in their management and procurement policies. I do not believe it would have been impossible to obtain the plants they were looking for in Scotland. "

Environmentalists in the area close to where the imported trees will come from have also condemned the plan.

Gottfried Brenner, of the Environmental and Forestry lobby group Bume fr Menschen (Trees for the World), said: "This is all round a bad idea - quite apart from the cost and the environmental damage of moving the trees. The latest research suggests that trees are much more sensitive to being moved around than people thought before. Even 100km [60 miles] makes a huge difference. Scottish frosts, air moisture, winds, soils, and surrounding vegetation will all be different. They will all contribute to shortening the lives of the trees considerably."