Talk:Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
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Page scope
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is about the institution as a holder of Cannabis material. The sheets themselves have their own accession pages, and the article lists them.
Sourcing
The institutional facts come from the garden's own website, its staff blog, its herbarium catalogue, the statute that governs it and Index Herbariorum. Specimen counts come from the catalogue and from GBIF. Discuss attribution, independent sourcing and any claim that has lost its attribution here.
Discussion
Source discrepancies
Each divergence is reported as the source gives it.
- Founding of the garden
- Our history and the RBGE Archive footer: 1670.
- The transcript of the Patron's video on Who we are: "When in 1672 doctors Andrew Balfour and Robert Sibbald established a modest physic garden".
- 1670, the year of the garden's history page, is the one used.
- Founding of the herbarium
- Index Herbariorum: dateFounded 1839.
- The garden's Herbarium page: "Established in the mid-1800s".
- Integrated Herbaria: the Botanical Society's herbarium was incorporated with the University's from 1839–40; foreign collections moved to the garden in 1863; the University's herbarium was formally transferred in 1872. The sequence gives no single founding year.
- Size of the herbarium
- Index Herbariorum: 3,000,000 specimens, with no date for the figure (record modified 18 February 2026).
- The garden's pages: "around three million specimens", undated. The only dated figure on them is the 2015 digitisation milestone of 300,000 specimens.
- Type specimens
- Index Herbariorum: typeSpecimensTotal 0.
- The Angiosperms page: 44,800 type specimens for angiosperms alone.
- Licence of the specimen images
- The catalogue's licence statement: data CC0 1.0, images CC BY 4.0.
- The Digitisation page: "All specimen images and data have a CC-0 licence."
- The IIIF manifests: CC BY-SA 2.5, attribution "Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh".
- GBIF's multimedia entries carry a CC0 URL, the licence "CC BY" and the rights line "Copyright Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh." together.
- The garden's images uploaded to this wiki carry CC BY-SA 2.5, which follows the manifests.
- Appointment of the trustees
- The 1985 Act, as printed on legislation.gov.uk: "The trustees shall be appointed by the Secretary of State."
- Who we are: "a Board of Trustees appointed by Scottish Ministers".
- Collection date of E00248604 (Wight)
- The catalogue and GBIF: October 1811.
- The wiki's accession for the sheet reads the annotation as October 1821, and the garden's Wight database gives 1820 to 1853 for Wight's collecting. The discrepancy belongs to the accession; this article does not date the sheet. Éloise 23:49, 4 October 2026 (+07)
Editorial treatment
- Title. The institution's own form, without a comma. The 1985 Act writes "Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh".
- Type material. The catalogue marks no Cannabis sheet as a type; it marks 731 sheets of Primula as types. None of the 190 GBIF entries carries a type status. McPartland and Small (2020) cite no Edinburgh specimen as a type. Types are therefore not mentioned.
- Counts. The catalogue lists 190 records for the genus Cannabis, and GBIF 190 occurrence entries for the genus at this institution. These counts are those of 4 October 2026 and will change as the catalogue grows. The country figures are GBIF's. Éloise 23:49, 4 October 2026 (+07)