Exploring Heriot-Watt University's gardens and trees

ROBBIE Fraser, landscape manager at Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, maintains an arboretum and a pinetum established in the 1700s. The Craigs of Riccarton, a family noted for their innovative attitude to estate management in Midlothian, designed the gardens in the ‘picturesque’ style. 

Centuries on, the atmospheric areas reveal the varied contributions made by subsequent generations who built on the vision of their forebears. Assisted by a workforce of 15, one of Robbie’s responsibilities is to ensure this beautiful, multi-faceted legacy endures. He has also introduced measures beneficial to the development of Heriot-Watt University’s well-tended ‘tranquil place’. 

This cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) suffered damage in 2010/11. (Image: EA)

Robbie works closely with the Edinburgh Campus Committee, which has a remit to retain the peaceful, harmonious nature of the gardens around which the university was built.

For this to happen, all aspects of landscape conservation, management and maintenance are discussed on a regular basis. Among the significant features to be taken into consideration is a superb 200-year-old lawn which supports not only 38 plant species but golden yew trees shaped into ‘dome’ and ‘drum’ forms. Offering privacy and shade, the so-called ‘Velvet Walk’ is a wide, grassed avenue that is deeply bordered by mature yews, holly and laurel. Weathered, stone-built walls surround three mature woodlands composed of Scottish native trees and exotic plantings. There is also a secluded and walled private cemetery. Precedence is therefore given to maintaining historical features, biodiversity, wildlife and the gardens’ impressive range of indigenous and exotic plants.

According to Robbie Fraser, many local people discovered the gardens during the COVID pandemic and keep returning. Not surprising, perhaps, when Heriot-Watt University’s estates team succeeds in retaining the gardens’ celebrated Green Flag status. 

Robbie said: “Our estates team has worked to maintain that beauty and environmental diversity, while also making the landscape work as a setting for a modern, high-tech university.”

Robbie has re-established a lapsed relationship that is not only furthering the gardens’ development but is raising the profile of Heriot-Watt University’s important tree heritage.

Robbie Fraser (Image: EA)

When approached, Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens, which initiated the prestigious International Conifer Conservation Programme, agreed to contribute a consignment of species from the programme to be nurtured in the Heriot-Watt gardens. Protected from browsing animals by wood-and-wire cages, the trees feature on the university’s extensive and informative Tree Trail. Solway Recycling produced its marker posts from recycled plastic. 

Koyama’s spruce (Picea koyamae) is endemic to the mountains of central Honshu, Japan, where it grows in isolated stands of between 10–20 trees. Estimates suggest approximately 300 trees remain. Typhoons decimate regeneration and as no economic worth is attributed to the rare spruce, windblown trees tend to be replaced by faster-growing species with commercial potential.

A Patagonian cypress (Fitzroya cupressoides) standing in a Chilean national park is thought to be almost 4,000 years old. Some of the country’s foremost scientific researchers consider the conifer, known as the ‘Great Grandfather’, could be the world’s oldest tree. Standing in a cool, moist valley, the slow-growing and thickly barked giant belongs to the family of redwoods and sequoias.

As students and staff cross on the aerial corridor between the university’s reception and the Hugh Nisbet Building they are afforded a close view of Heriot-Watt’s ‘big trees’. (Image: EA)

Nicknamed ‘Flaky fir’ due to its copper-coloured peeling bark, Abies squamata grows in the north-facing, high-altitude mixed coniferous forests of the Tibetan Plateau. Although a logging ban was introduced in the late 1990s, decades of exploitation have resulted in the conifer’s decline. Reforestation omitted the tree as it is subject to stem rot.

When Robbie Fraser and his staff are on top of general maintenance tasks, the development of projects is encouraged. At present, experimental plantings of tree fern species are being appraised and, in some instances, relocated elsewhere in the garden.

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There are also plans to extend the ‘all-user friendly’ pathway system. Laurel – which was rife when Robbie became landscape manager – has been cleared and will be replaced by rhododendron species. A horticulturalist by profession, Robbie is also reintroducing both wild and cultivated flowers to the gardens.

James Young, a gardener at Riccarton in the 1800s, developed the Fuchsia magellanica cultivar ‘Riccartonii’. If folklore is to be believed, James Lee, the celebrated Scots-born botanist and gardener, chanced upon Fuchsia magellanica after an acquaintance advised him to visit a seafarer’s home which displayed an unusual plant of striking appearance.

Silver birch (Betula pendula) and Downy birch (Betula pubescens), the most common native trees in Scotland, are valued not only for their timber but for their beauty across the seasons. (Image: EA)

Lee – a partner in a prominent London-based horticultural nursery that based plant collectors in South America and South Africa – hastened to the house only to find the sailor had already set sail on another voyage. Securing the shrub from his wife proved costly, but Lee was informed it had been brought from the West Indies. James Lee propagated the plant and showcased blooming specimens in his window; advertising that caused Fuchsia magellanica to become a costly ‘must-have’ plant for the upper classes.

Several beech trees planted during Robbie Fraser’s tenure are thriving; just as well, as he hopes his legacy will survive for several hundred years! And it is hardly surprising that Heriot-Watt University’s landscape manager should admit to a fondness for birch varieties. After all, the renowned 19th-century Scottish botanist J.C. Loudon noted in his Encyclopaedia of Trees and Shrubs: “The Highlanders of Scotland make everything from the birch tree.”

History also informs Robbie’s position as landscape manager. 700 years ago, Robert the Bruce gave his daughter Marjory land at Ricardstone to the west of Edinburgh. It was enclosed in the late 16th century by Sir Thomas Craig, an affluent lawyer and agricultural reformist. Sir Lewis Craig is credited with planting shelterbelts, developing parkland and planting a grand avenue of beech, interspersed with planes and oaks. Sir James Gibson-Craig added the enhancements of a walled garden and an artificial loch. He was a keen plant collector who, after passing his interest on to his son William, sent him on a lengthy tour of Europe’s foremost gardens. Thus influenced, on his return to Riccarton William designed a sunken ‘sports’ lawn that, when water-logged and frozen, served as a curling pond.

Landscape architect Arnold Weddle intended Heriot-Watt’s original low-rise, dark brown brick buildings to harmonise well with the Riccarton estate’s mature designed surrounds. (Image: EA)

In the late 1800s, 60 members of the Scottish Arboricultural Society toured Riccarton, where they are reported to have inspected ‘some of the finest timber’. They were also able to study ‘new conifers’ planted by Sir William Gibson-Craig some 30 years earlier.

Sir William subscribed to the illustrious Oregon Society which had funded the plant hunter John Jeffrey’s expedition to the USA’s north-western states. Why Jeffrey eventually ceased returning collections of seeds, leaves, etc to Britain and ignored any attempts at communication we shall never know. It could be that Sir William ‘crossed the pond’ in an attempt to ascertain his whereabouts. Jeffrey was never found, but what better way for W. Gibson-Craig to showcase the ‘exotics’ he saw with his own eyes than to plant examples at Riccarton?

The Riccarton estate declined after it was requisitioned for military purposes throughout WWII and for several decades thereafter. Midlothian County Council took over ownership of the property in the 1960s and gifted it to the educational institution known as ‘Scotland’s first true people’s college’. A century on from its establishment, and after many changes of location, Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University was to have a permanent site.

Professor Arnold Weddle was a distinguished landscape architect and the founder of the Sheffield-based enterprise Weddle Landscape Design.  He addressed the challenge of designing a contemporary and spacious campus that would include several innovative technological facilities and allow for a future increase in their number, by studying what was already in place on-site. Riccarton House had, of necessity, been demolished, but several other important architectural features remained and gave historical perspective to its still recognisable, although neglected, designed surrounds. Arnold Weddle had his focus; sympathetically restored, the gardens would form a welcoming ‘green oasis’, open to all, lying at the heart of the Scottish capital’s bustling university.